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OUR SKETCHING CLUB.
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OUR SKETCHING CLUB.
LETTERS AND STUDIES ON LANDSCAPE ART.
REV. R. ST. JOHN TYRWHITT, M. A.
Formerly Student and Rhetoric Reader of Ch. Ch., Oxford.
WITH AN AUTHORISED REPRODUCTION OF THE LESSONS AND WOODCUTS IN PROFESSOR
RUSKIN'S 'ELEMENTS OF DRAWING.'
MACMILLAN AND CO. 1874
\_All rights reserved ~\
OXFORD :
BY E. PICKARD HALL AND J. H. STACY, PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY.
PREFACE.
THE original introduction to this book may partly account for the heterogeneous nature of its con- tents. A carefully-made index rerum has been added to it, which may, I trust, atone for this in great measure, to readers in search of hints on English Landscape. But for further excuse, I should like to explain in a straightforward manner how the book came to be what it is.
First, I received a kind invitation from Messrs. Roberts of Boston, and some American friends, to write a book on Landscape. It was to be very elementary as to practice, and to begin at the beginning, with the ordinary rules of drawing. It was also to be made palatable by means of descriptions and verbal sketches : and was to take the form of transactions of a Sketching Club, whose members were to exchange ideas by letter or conversation : this involved digressions into criticism and history of art.
Then it appeared that though my friends on the other side approved the first part or two as useful to students of drawing, they wanted a little more description of the English country life and ways, with which I am partially acquainted ; and it was mentioned that as male and female characters existed in the book, they would have to make love to each other. Some excursuses on fox-hunting were also desired. These demands were accordingly supplied, I trust in moderation.
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PREFACE.
This was variety enough, in all conscience ; and Mr. Macmillan having seen the first two parts of the book, undertook to publish it when completed, on this side the Atlantic. But it now further received the appro- bation of the Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, who, with a kindness which his friends have learned to take as quite a matter of course, gave me leave to use as illustrations of my various lessons, any or all of the wood-blocks first employed in his ' Elements of Draw- ing/ which he does not propose to re-issue. Further- more, he commissioned me to reproduce in my own way all such parts of his instructions in that book as might seem to suit my purpose. It had been all along to produce a book on practical art, which should not only direct adult students, educated in other matters, in an elementary course of drawing, but should deal in some degree with principles ; and if possible, give some amusement and interest by the way. On re-reading Elements of Drawing, I found, as may be expected, that I had repeated many of its lessons already ; it was now my object to omit as little as possible of the remaining substance of the book. And, as many of the Professor's observations and descriptions can only be given in his own language, it is quite possible that they will appear rather as purple patches in my own work. It cannot be helped, and is'by no means to be lamented.
For the characters and narrative chapters of the book, all I can say is, that there is as little of them as possible, that they are a good deal from life ; and that the parts relating to flood and field are strictly after nature and experience. Art might very possibly be better and purer without field-sports of any kind. In theory, I suppose sport would mean the same thing as gymnastic exercise,
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and should be confined to the Pentathlum, with horse and chariot-racing. I cannot argue this, or the endless cognate questions, in this book, and have said my say on the subject elsewhere. But the chase in its wilder and truer forms is inextricably connected with the most de- lightful and romantic passages of Scottish and English landscape, and I do not believe they will ever be se- parated from it. For luxurious butchery of domestic pigeons, and multitudinous murder of tame pheasants, I have never shared in or witnessed either, and I loathe the idea of both.
To quote a distinction made not long ago on a far more important matter, this book may be said to be a series of papers on Landscape Art — that is to say, on all works of art in which landscape is concerned — and to contain, as is hoped, a sound practical system of drawing and painting from Nature in water-colours. It has taken the form of a set of supposed letters, essays, and conversations on various Art subjects, such as are likely to be exchanged between fairly good critics and well- educated men and women in one of the Sketching or Drawing Clubs which are now growing so numerous in this country. It seems that these societies may at no distant time have a beneficial influence on education. They encourage the study of natural beauty, and quicken the senses to which it appeals. By ' natural beauty' I understand, pleasure derived from the external ap- pearance of things intended by Divine Law to sup- ply men with contemplative enjoyment. Further, the real relation between fine art and science is founded on the connexion between external form and inner structure, the outsides and insides of things. Art con- templates the one, Science investigates the other, and though art is and ought to be pursued for her own sake,
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she is the willing handmaid of Science. The great and increasing importance of illustration in various studies proves the value of graphic teaching. As long as form is connected with inner structure, Art must bear on education in the physics of the things that are. As long as the mind is capable of receiving clearer or fuller information by the use of symbol in form or colour, so long must Art bear on the histories of the things that have been.
It has seemed best to have names and characters, and make them write or talk the matter of this book to each other. But the object, after all, is practical teaching or discussion, though descriptions are here and there inserted of the picturesque of ordinary English life, as far as any such thing exists. I do not think it necessary to have in any disagreeable person. Art has to do with what is beautiful : and in landscape, at least, beauty may be sufficiently well contrasted with grand, or melancholy, or even distressing objects, without using things or char- acters mean, base, or brutal, which the regular novelist may be justified in employing.
It will, I think, be a sufficient guarantee for the edu- cational value of the present book, that it contains a reproduction of Professor Ruskin's lessons, in a yet more popular form than that in which they first appeared.
R. ST. JOHN TYRWHITT.
Ketilby, Oxford.
CONTENTS.
Introduction, Club and Critic 1-5
CHAP. I. — An Art Student in Oxford. Competition. Venice, Florence, and Baker-street. Art and Poverty. Shadow of Disappointment. Flora. Rules for a Sketching Club. The Professor. Drawing a jam- pot 6-24
CHAP. II. — The Great Master. Perspective made easy. Way into a picture. Transparent and body-colour. Form by shadow. How to learn Gradation. Over-ambitious subject 25-37
CHAP. III. — Flora and May. Deer-stalking. Sketches and studies. Natural realism and its value. Evenness of finish .... 38-51
CHAP. IV. — West Highland scenery and colours. Grouse. Squared glass and its uses. Hamerton on portrait as preliminary study to landscape. Thorough or professional work. Elementary exercises in form and colour. Grays 52_73
CHAP. V. — Eggs is eggs. A lecture on the Renaissance . . . 74- 102
CHAP. VI. — Hawkstone Holt and Susan Milton. An Autumn study.
103-1 28
CHAP. VII. — Tree-drawing ab initio. Harding and Turner. The Testudo. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table 1 29-141
CHAP. VIII.— Oxford. Port Meadow. May and Charley. A day with the Heythrop. The Chase as a subject of painting . . . 142-158
CHAP. IX. — A Garden Chat. Tree-drawing. Art and Science. Leaves and branches from nature. Miniature and distance. Copying from Turner and A. Diirer. Examples 159-188
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CONTENTS.
CHAP. X. — Landseer and Hunt, Diirer and Turner. Intelligent work. Graphic power. Spring. Going for the facts. ' Doing ' grass. How to study the Liber Studiorum. Organic laws. Radiation and liberty of foliage. Art and moral habit. Individuality .... 189-223
CHAP. XI. — A truant lover. Difficulties of colour and choice of subject. Rules and suggestions. Longing for mountains. Motives. Paint your impressions. A palette. Mixed tints. Matching landscape colours. Study of drapery and wild flowers. Blending wet colour. A parting. Lady Susan Cawthorne 224-252
CHAP. XII.— The Rev. Ripon. Club letters. Black and white as colours. Dress. 'Advancing' and 'retiring' colours. Turner's Ehrenbreit- stein. Laws of composition. Unity, Symmetry, Curvature, Radiation, Harmony, &c. Calais Sands. Bridges. Good and bad curves. Colour and finish. A galloping outline 253-298
CHAP. XIII. — Contrasts and harmonies from nature. Finish, technical and intellectual. Growing old. Spring. Landscape never fails.
299-3 1 5
CHAP. XIV. — Red Scaurs and Ravensgill Towers. Salmon-fishing. Razor Brigg Cast. Turneresque study from nature on gray paper . 316-330
CHAP. XV. — Home and doubts 33!-335
CHAP. XVI. — A Hawkstone dinner-party and a lover's quarrel 336-351
CHAP. XVII. — 'A cracker' with the Goredale. Redintegratio. Old Warhawk's grave 352-370
Index 371
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
Frontispiece, ' Like Going,' V. Brooks, after R. St. J. Tynvhitt. See p. 295.
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ERRATA.
Page 257, lines 5 and 6, transpose comma after 'white' and semicolon after 'greens.'
line 22, for or read a.
Page 258, line 17, for objective read subjective.
OUR SKETCHING CLUB.
INTRODUCTION.
MANY persons who are interested in Art may not have heard of an institution of English town and country life in the middle and upper classes, which seems to give youths and maidens a good deal of pleasure and some instruction, and which their utmost ingenuity has hitherto failed to make in any degree mis- chievous. We mean the Sketching Clubs, which are. now extended all over the country. We suppose they must develop a certain amount of real manual skill in the operations of Art, and teach perhaps nearly all that water-colour can teach, at least in landscape sketching. As a natural consequence, they ought to improve press criticism a little ; further, they direct attention to good realist landscape, which is at pre- sent the best hope of English and American paint- ing, as far as we can see ; and then they seem to exercise imagination and fancy very pleasingly, and in almost every case to produce habits of close ob- servation, which make all the difference between eyes and no eyes to a student of a few months' standing.
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There can be no more valuable habit than that of no- ticing and observing, and nothing can form it much better than sketching ; for all knowledge is vision, after all, by natural eye or by mind's eye. If these societies only afforded intermission and relief from that sad idle- ness and emptiness which is one of the dangers of English middle life, they would be valuable ; but they do more, and really amount to a means of self-education and self-expression. To young women in particular they afford, under good criticism, just what they most want ; that is to say, help and encouragement to learn some- thing thoroughly, and in a standard or workmanlike manner.
Working with the public art schools, which have long been heavily influenced by the higher criticism of Mr. Ruskin, and will probably fall more immediately under his guidance as he completes his forthcoming system of education in graphic art, the private clubs ought to make nature and art, or pictorial observation and record, something like a contribution to human happiness.
Granting the members, viz. a sufficient number of people who will draw, nothing is easier than to estab- lish an art-club, and they all go by nearly the same rules. The sole property of the society generally con- sists of a portfolio with a leather case ; and their chief expense, for the most part, is the hire of a critic, who should also be protected by some strong outer covering. He is generally a professional workman, and it is under- stood that he is to be as irritating as possible in a letter once a month, or once in two months. But his real work is to examine each member's productions very carefully, and tell him or her what to do, which is by no means so easy. There must be a secretary to do all the work of collecting the drawings, etc. A lady is
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best, because she will have more chance of being at- tended to, and she should have a committee to help her, who should never meet unless she asks them. Rules are generally to the following purpose: 1. Small annual subscription. 2. Everybody is to send one or more drawings per month, or every two months, to the secretary, carriage paid ; if that is not settled people invariably quarrel about it. 3. Everybody suggests a subject in turn, and three subjects are generally offered at a time, the members choosing one or more to illus- trate as they please. 4. Everybody has a number, and is known by that only, in the portfolio. 5. When the portfolio is made up (generally as a large book) it is sent to the critic, who returns it to the secretary, with his opinions ; and they are then sent round together to all the members.
Like everything else, this is all either education, or pastime, or waste of time, according to the characters engaged in it ; but its advantages to thorough and will- ing people seem likely to be great. Much depends on the critic. Our own ideal, again, would be a lady thoroughly educated in art, and possessed of that verve, piquancy, and fluency in letter-writing which so many of our sisters rejoice in. She ought to gush abundantly over all the strong points, and vituperate faithfully about the weak ones, using all her tact and exposing the latent carelessnesses or ignorances which cause frailty in execution.
The great difficulty is, to get people to see when their work won't do, and to try back, and attempt simpler things where they cannot do the more difficult. They must be led to understand that there is no such thing as amateur drawing, in any real sense. There is only good, bad, and indifferent work, and the good alone is worth
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doiiig. But students' work on a system, or any pro- gressive labour, is to be counted as good, though it be ever so imperfect.
Critic should have a fair knowledge of books, poetry in particular, but should beware of quoting much him- self. There is another reason for getting a lady critic if you can, that it prevents those postal flirtations, in which a zealous master, who answers questions, is not unlikely to be involved. All letters should go through the secretary, of course.
This present book, or series of papers, is intended to contain a set of supposed letters, talks, and essays on various Art subjects, — nearly all practical ones, — such as would be likely to be exchanged between fairly good critics and well-educated men and women in one of the societies above described. The writer accepted the position of critic, never mind where in the English Mid- lands, a year or two ago. His letters, he is informed, are considered worth reading ; and he has succeeded in making all his club draw jam-pots, — an exercise which he has high authority for considering as a central pons asinorum in all drawing. He thinks it possible that clubs as good, and better critics, may soon spring up in America, — conceiving the pursuit of landscape art to be as well adapted to country life in the United States as it unquestionably is to that of England. And sketching combines so well with the athletic, or campaigning forms of travel, that it may be commended quite as heartily to the male sex as the female.
The author thinks it better to have names and cha- racters, and make them talk or write to each other. To put them into a regular story would make an art-novel ; and his object is practical teaching, or discussion. But verbal sketching is to be the order of the work, and he
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likes well-known figures with well-remembered land- scape. Letters on oil and water-colours from nature, — on Scottish, Norwegian, Swiss, and Italian scenery, — on drawing in Egypt, the Sinai Desert, and Holy Land, with references to standard works, to the French and Belgian schools, etc., are part of his plan, which must depend for its development on many circumstances as yet undetermined.
CHAPTER I.
CHARLEY CAWTHORNE always called himself a painter and glazier. He was a Yorkshireman, well-bred, and something more than well-looking, who had taken to art before it came into fashion, because he liked it very much. He had never been conscious of great abilities of any kind. Eton and Christ Church had, at all events taught him taciturnity, if not modesty, in his judg- ment of his own performances. Oil-painting, as a pur- suit, is in fact better countenanced in the world than in our ancient universities. Oxford education has come to be a money-scramble, like everything else, except that it is fairly conducted ; and nobody's contempt for culture and spiritual development can be much stronger than that of a lad of twenty, who has just tasted unearned money, and finds that he can get provided for for life if he makes a decent use of his school-work. The elder Mr. Osbaldistone himself could not have despised his son more for taking to poetry, than academic competi- tion-wallahs did poor Charley's aspirations. ' O, Caw- thorne's line is high art, his is,' was the pitying summary of many a thin-lipped little shark, in earnest expectation of firsts, fellowships, and mandarin promotion. Reading men scouted the action of any study which did not promise immediate pay. Nor did that abundance of happy idleness, which comes and goes in the old quad- rangles like an irregular tide, give him much more
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countenance. He went out hunting now and then, and generally saw the best part of a run ; and he was always sailing and rowing ; but he hardly cared to be an authority in horse and dog talk, and was guilty of professing interest beyond four-oars and eight-oars. And he was almost entirely deficient in the vices. So hunting men and boating men took him pleasantly enough for his own sake, as the right sort of fellow that one could trust anywhere ; a regular bird, in fact, only given over to drawing and that sort of bosh. Once he published some hunting sketches, introducing a few friends in more or less critical positions, and the work gained him some profit and glory. But the under- graduate mind was soon after absorbed by the simpler forms of photographic art, which consist in representing the university authorities in general with immense heads, and rowing in eight-oars. As a graphic aggression on the Dons, Charley owned this to be admirable ; but he once observed that 'the lowly youths who practised it must be extremely mean cusses.' Some of his college pastors and masters gave Charley what encouragement they could. A safe passman, willing to read a little history, and able to talk on any subjects beyond the two Hinckseys, is always a comfort to his tutor, and well- regarded in common-room, especially if he ' belongs to a county.' His tutor, the Rev. Oliver Latchford, was a Shropshire divine, of equestrian as well as scholarly habits, and kindly regarded the pupil he did not pretend to understand. Like many Englishmen, he really cared for realist landscape only, in matters of art, and for that landscape which associated itself most nearly with his own tastes ; that seemed enough for him. Moreover, he was an Ireland scholar, and double-first, and about as keen, within his own pretty wide horizon, as the severest
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form of old Oxford work could make him. He was the best of all Philistines ; he knew what he knew so well as to despise half-knowledges, aspirations, emotions, intui- tions, and visions in general. You might have them if you liked ; it was the regular thing for nice lads ; only don't talk about them, at least when sober. ' There may be clouds,' he once said to Charley ; ' but as your tutor, I can only recommend you to keep out of them, and go to the bar.' Still his pupil knew himself to be well regarded, and the Dons in general liked him ; his pur- suits were allowed to give him an existence in the in- tellectual world. And indeed some very natural objec- tions to his throwing himself away by taking to painting, had been seriously made and quietly withdrawn at home, so that he had the inestimable advantage of starting in a then irregular line of life without quarrelling with the regulars ; and moreover without expecting very much of the world. He did not think himself a genius, nor calculate on being paid for genius ; he was simply very fond of painting, and thought he might make a livelihood by making pictures.
So he left Oxford, as the better sort of men used to leave it in his day, who neither took orders nor made Oxford their trade ; that is to say, he came away better educated than informed. What one sees of the place now makes one fancy that a good many lads go off informed, or coached, for the present, beyond their capacity ; somewhat over-rewarded by the prizes offered through the competitive system, and consequently with attention fixed, generally for life, on the profits of learn- ing rather than on learning itself. They have taken in a stock-in-trade of information ; they expect a high price for it, and are not quite educated to work with, or for, or under other men. Cawthorne thought little about
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profits ; he saw he would have to follow a profession mainly for its own sake, and he did not expect much from other men. They could give him little better, in fact, than he had already. He had the disadvantage, if it be one, of never having felt poverty himself ; but at all events he had seen enough to be thankful for his own place. He had been brought up in common Christian duties in the old country fashion ; he knew people were poor and ill, then liked to see them, and do something himself; he would get a couple of rabbits for a sick collier, and then go and read to him ; he tried to teach in a school, but they said he interfered with discipline ; he gave the parson some of his money ; he talked Yorkshire to the old men and women at home ; sub- scribed to Oxford schools and charities, and was liberal to his accustomed cads. The world seemed pleasant to him, as it well may to those who lead the English country life in health. On the whole he knew no state much more to be desired than his own, and would have said with Tennyson, ' Let me lead my life.' People told him all men were shams, and he only answered, that from his experience horses wefe often still worse.
He had a year at Rome, and another at Florence and Venice, where hard work in some degree supplied the want of systematic teaching. And from a lodging on the Riva dei Schiavoni, with a mind full of Titian and Tintoret, he came home to settle in a Baker-street studio, and to ascertain how far the traditions of work which had contented the Grand Council would suit the tastes of the British public. He says he has never answered the question yet, at least not satisfactorily, but means to go on propounding it after his fashion.
It did not take many months to teach him the dif- ference between a painter's student-life and his working-
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life ; and how very unlike are the feelings of preparation for a doubtful struggle to those of the struggle itself. Instead of the life of observation, and admiring pupilage under men long passed away, who still live to their disciples in their greatest deeds only, he had to think and paint for himself ; and with independence, all the weight of self-mistrust came on him. Had he been really called to the work he had undertaken ? No- body seemed to think so, very much. It was real and serious enough to him ; he wanted, as he said, to give his life to art ; — but life is such a long and varied thing, and art is so hard to define, at least, so as to please your patrons. As a student he had only wanted success in the form of increasing skill ; now he wanted it in the shape of buyers.
As one's faith in any fact is doubled or tripled as soon as one finds anybody to believe it with one, so in par- ticular with the belief in one's self; and it tried Charley's strength to find how few cared for him. He was not stimulated by poverty, for he wanted for nothing ; he was welcome in many houses besides his father's town abode ; he did not like to be thought sulky or priggish ; rode in the park ; went to a few parties, and looked up old Oxford friends. People said they envied him ; many of them really did, and ladies called him Clive Newcome. But he found it would take years to emancipate himself from the name of amateur and dillettante. The mere fact that he was not starving was against him ; but his being able to keep a horse made him quite unreliable in the trade. In fact, he was not poor enough to go regularly in a picture-seller's service, and it is hard to say what else a young man can do who wants a good commercial start in painting. Besides, not a few men who liked him well enough, but who had themselves laboured
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through years of poverty, if they did not envy him, would do nothing to help him to fame or commissions. Life is sadly unequal, and poor Charley's Yorkshire intuitions soon taught him that most men who have known want are apt to assume it as a virtue, and to hang together against the pleasantly nurtured. That is the worst of popularising a great profession ; you crowd it with people who cannot well be great ; it tempts them to undergo all sorts of trials ; they don't always come well out of them, and get to think that suffering alone ought to have its reward, and that poverty in itself naturally evolves genius. Heine was perhaps right about artistic envy, but he ought to have allowed the excuses of artistic suffering.
It seemed odd, though indisputable, to our friend, that his Eton and Oxford education — irrespectively of its having taught him so little — should stand in his way with R. A.'s and dealers, and the British merchant, and everybody, as it seemed, whose bread or whose pleasure was in oil-painting. He talked of it to his two or three best-regarded masters. Classics and high subject and historical painting, — they had all tried them hard, and they smiled and stroked their beards. Phoebus pointed to a whole stratum of great cartoons, and said he had to live by portraits when his soul desired fresco. Stern- chase showed him a tremendous picture, alive with form and aflame with colour, and said he had been three years over that, doing pot-boilers all the time, and it might be ready in eighteen months more. De Vair's ideals of Arthur and Dante went off as fast as he liked to paint them ; but he was tired of them, and of most other things, and was going into literature. Grief had borne hard on these three, Cawthorne well knew, and he won- dered all the more how they clung to their work, — being
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far too young to have experience of the stage when men labour because nothing is left them in the world but toil. He had just got a glimmering of the very practical truth that his strength was labour and sorrow ; he was to learn in due time that labour and sorrow might be his strength.
Meanwhile he worked away with the true wolf's gallop, and could not be altogether passed over. One or two Leeds men knew his name and bought his work. He was heard of as far as Manchester, and a picture or two went thither ; and now and then an American would turn up in his studio, like an unimpassioned pilgrim from beyond the sea, remind him of friends made long ago in Rome or Venice, and perhaps order a bit of scenery from one or the other. You never find these people far wrong when they exert themselves to choose what they like because they like it. He went into decoration for a time, and felt something of the strange, dreamy delight of painting all day in a church-apse, among quiet hues and dim sounds, as the coloured lights describe slow arcs below their windows all day long, and the shadows lengthen and change till the place seems always another place and one's self never the same man. He was personally popular ; dealers did wish he would do nice genre things, like Witchpot, R. A., now, or get in with the great Mr. Tingrind, so as his things might 'ave a sale ; for after all he was a pleasant feller for a swell, with a deal of go, and could paint uncom- mon honest.
But for all that he was beginning to see very early, and far ahead, as painters and writers do, the gray, varying shadow men call by the name of Disappoint- ment. If a man bought a picture he seldom wanted ■ another ; if the Academy hung one, they hung it very
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high. What was Giorgione or his followers to them? they wanted followers of their own. Here was a knot of young men, like Charley and his friends Hicks and Brownjones, who had not been taught in the R. A. school, and were taking a line of subjects not fancied in the school ; and, in short, they must be put down. Phoebus was alone and outvoted ; Sternchase and De Vair were in revolt ; Tingrind didn't care ; so Queen Elizabeth and the Vicar of Wakefield, bishops and Aphrodites, lord mayors and masters of hounds, white muslin and infant piety, made the mixture as before in Burlington House, and Cawthorne's Ariadnes and Per- sephones came back to Baker Street, and went north- ward to come back no more.
Disappointment is a curious old ghost, and is often not unkind. Sometimes she vanishes, sometimes the light comes through her, and her grays are many- coloured. But one thing, Charley said, never could disappoint, and that was landscape from nature. The older he grew, the more pleasure there was in painting his own moors, and the woods he was used to. People wanted his sketches more than his pictures, as they always do ; but for a time he took to working from a hut with proper appliances, and finished faithfully on the spot, if not exactly out of doors. It seemed to give him a new start, and the student's freshness of increasing knowledge and dexterity of record came back to him again whenever he really strained all his science at a burn-side.
And about this time, after a grouse drive on Grey- thwaite Scaurs, news of the artistic world came to him in the shape of the following letter from a fair and far-off cousin, a flirt of other days, older than himself, and settled long ago in the Midlands.
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Hawkstone, Bristlebury, Sept. 12.
My Dear Charles,
It seems hardly respectful to call you Charley, although I never can find anybody who knows you by any other name ; and we have all been talking of your pictures all last week ; that is to say, we women have : men at this time of the year are always quarrelling about central-fire and pin-fire, or else they are deep in dogs. You must know I have a great favour to ask for myself, and a good many others, apropos of our Sketch- ing Society. Don't be angry, and talk about the im- pudence of these creatures ; we want you to be our critic. Only just be good a moment while I coax you about it, — only by letter, — and think of how you would have done anything, so long ago, when you were little ! There are a great many of us, you know ; some swells, and some good artists, I really think, in an amateur, or ladies'-exhibition sort of way ; though, by the bye, we have our share of gentlemen. There is no keeping them out, and really, if we did, I do not think the girls would like it. But we are rather tired of dear old Mr. Hog- badger, the Bristlebury art-master, and so he is of us ; and he says he wants to paint a little for himself and the Royal Academy. Besides, he does not laugh at us enough, and being only scolded is nothing, by post. He used to point out wrong perspectives and bad draw- ing very well. But now most of us avoid great offences ; or else he is tired of telling us about them, and he does not tell us what to do enough. I suppose it is hard to bring regular studio drawing to the help of us poor sketchers ; but really I do not think he has seen much scenery. And we wrote to young Mr. Verditer, and he
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said he had to paint, and did'nt care for talking about it ; and Mr. Martel told us we had better read his books, which we do, I am sure. Then at last, when I was in despair, I was introduced to your Oxford Pro- fessor, and asked him whom I could ask, and he said you, and that you were to write to him about it, and to be good to us. Now do : and think it well over, and make us some rules for our work. We really do want to get on and to do right ; you know the only woman's rights I ever cared for (except being courted and mar- ried) were that my girls and I might learn something as men learn it, out and out. And I think that the higher the amateur clubs can get in their work, the more likely people are to ask for good subjects and spirited things in exhibitions, — which will be good for you. This is quite a business letter, so I will only send all our love, and say that they have got two hundred and fifty brace of partridges already, strictly over dogs ; that they are all very good-tempered and nice when awake, which, happily, they seldom are, except at meals ; that all the boys and girls are well, and that John has shot very f airly, and hopes to reduce himself to thirteen stone by hard labour. Do write soon and tell us something ; we will give you £30 a year.
Ever your old cousin,
Flora Lattermath.
P.S. Margaret Langdale is here, and is one of us ; she really looks very grand, and works very hard.
Whereto, after due consideration and correspondence, Charley made answer thus : —
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Hellifield Tarn, Sept. 20.
My Dear Florence (long and respectful for Flora, I presume),
This is to be a business letter, of course ; so accept my assurance that we are all right, and have got a thousand brace by this time, driven grouse. Also re- member me faithfully to Margaret, whom I put in my first sentence, probably for the same reason that you put her in your P.S. I have no doubt she will derive material advantage from pursuing her studies with me. Well, I have written to the Professor ; and he says I am to criticise you, if you will abide by certain additional rules, generally speaking. (He says, moreover, if you will not, not.) By criticising, I mean telling you what you ought not to have done in the sketches before me, and also what you ought to do to them. This last, you know, will require more or less illustration in my own hand, so that you will give a fair amount of trouble for your money. Your usual rules about being anony- mous numbers, and of one drawing a month, or fine, are good ; but I want a number of others, all in the way of discipline ; and, in fact, I can't undertake without them. If you think you really are going to improve public taste, — which I am sure seems possible, and you can't by any effort or chance make it worse, — you must really learn to draw above the popular standard.
Now do you be good too, and remember when you were little, — in your own eyes. These are my rules, whereby I mean to stick.
1. Drawings sent me for criticism shall be landscape only, unless I write to anybody permitting and request-
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ing him or her to do figure subject. By this last, I mean any subject where the chief interest depends on the attitude or expression of figures, or on skill or labour bestowed on them. I allow interiors, but consider that they ought to • have for their motives either study of light and shade combined with perspective, or still life ; and that figures should be introduced unsentimentally, and only as objects reflecting light. I object to Mother being Bad (especially in drawing), and utterly protest against Helping Mother, and all illustration of the domestic affections or rural virtues ; still more against the corresponding vices.
2. This is not to prevent anybody's introducing small figures wherever force, or incident, or distance, or local colour is wanted ; or wherever accidental colour is noticed or wanted in a landscape sketch, as a pink and white striped skirt in a hay-field, or a red coat on a winter's evening. (I'm so glad you go on wearing and distribut- ing scarlet cloaks ; give my love to old Polly at the West Lodge, and say as sure as ever I come to Hawkstone I'll take her head off.) For the kind and use of figures I mean, see the Liber Studiorum.
3. There may be three subjects a month as usual, but I must dictate one of them, and that must be done somehow by everybody. I never scold, and always praise where I can ; and after the first time or two, I will give you pretty things to do.
4. Except by special license, everything is to be done on white paper, not too rough : unless where a single object or small group is done in the centre of a sheet by way of study, the white paper should be covered into the corners. I wish you would all use hot-pressed paper, or Bristol-board, invariably1.
1 There is a fine-grained paper of Whatman's, which seems to
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5. Without prejudice to old members of the club, new ones ought either to produce tolerable drawings of their own, or do one for qualification ; or undertake on honour to go through a certain course of practice, till I pass them into full membership. Honorary, or inactive, or literary members you may have, but they are not my business. I will look at photographs, but can't promise to criticise them.
6. Last and irrevocable. Every active member of the club is to send me, by any date within this year, a drawing of a white jam-pot on white paper, in stippled chalk, or in sepia, or pencil shading, or pencil washed with water-colours (sepia or gray), which last I recom- mend. I will give a small landscape sketch of my own to the best drawing ; and I had rather not criticise any- body who does not send me one. To be done as a study, the whole paper need not be covered. The Per- fessor has seen these stipulations, and approves ; and any backslider or blasphemer may expect to be swallowed whole, with some abruptness. Respect this accordingly, my dear Flora ; and whatever you do, don't let me guess which are May's works. The money will do. Love to John and the creatures.
Ever yours, affectionately,
C. C.
Letter LIL. My Dear Charley :
At last they all seem good and submissive, on the whole, and our first portfolio of jam-pots will be duly forwarded to you in November. But oh, I do wish you and the P. knew what a life I shall have, meanwhile,
unite the advantages of roughness and smoothness, by the regularity of its unevenness.
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with all the club. Do send a decisive allocution about the drawings, answering these questions from various members. (The men are worse than the girls.)
1. May they group anything with the White Wessel, as they call it ?
2. May they substitute Jamaica-ginger-pots ?
3. Or brown glazed pickle-jars with reflections ?
4. Or any sort of red pottery ?
5. Or old china in any form ?
6. Or use gray paper and Chinese white ?
Don't be too hard.
Affectionately yours,
F.
P.S. — As if you wouldn't know ! What hypocrites some people are !
Letter IV.
My Dear Flora :
No, to all the questions. Do it in sepia or pencil as fine as you can ; the gooseberry vessel of our child- hood, and nothing but it. / have done you a nice prize, though I say it.
Affectionately yours,
C. C.
P. S. — I don't know her's from Adam's.
Letter V.
Baker Street, October 1.
My Dear Flora:
I have received twenty-six jam-pots in your portfolio. I quite agree that the quarter-sheet should be your largest size, and the eighth your smallest. Those who use the latter henceforth ought to do so as students
C 2
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of Turner, and to them, for that purpose, I concede gray paper. But it is no use drawing at that small size except under his guidance ; and I hardly know how you can get it, without visiting Oxford, Cambridge, or South Kensington. If you have any very patient, keen and skilful water-colourist among you, and you seem to have one or two, it would be a great thing to get her or him to go to Oxford for a month and copy, let us say, Combe Martin, and the Coteaux des Mauves in the Gallery there, under Mac-Diarmid and the Professor. No pains should be spared, for the object will be to produce such fac-similes, touch for touch, as shall be fit to be circulated and used by the club as copies. They should be signed by Mac, if they can be got up to that point, and the club should make the artist some acknowledgment in proportion to the severe labour involved.
But now to these drawings. Everybody has done her best I really think. One or two are confused and messed a little ; some are washed and sponged and rubbed. I wanted all to be done with repeated washes or patches laid on strictly in planned form, leaving the edges in the first instance, and stippling and hatching them into mass afterwards. There is one way to make a study in light and shade : — to mark the highest lights and leave them blank, then to run the faintest coat of shade over everything else ; then the next coat, and so on seriatim. It is rather curious that three of these studies, which I really think are the three best, represent very fairly the three pillars given in ' Modern Painters ' as examples of Rembrandt's, Turner's, and Veronese's systems of chiaroscuro. I wish you would all read that chapter (vol. iv, part v, chap, iii, p. 34) very carefully ; but for those who regret that they can't take the trouble, I will send my own abstract of it, and here it is.
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I'll trouble any member of the club, or of society, to tell me what ' white ' means in a picture ? It expresses either light, or local colour; and in your drawing you have only the paper-whiteness to stand for both. And paper is not very white. You all thought me very brutal because I would not let you use tinted paper ; I would not, because white paper, the very whitest, is tinted, or darkened enough already. Consider, the sheet on which a picture is painted is an opaque white surface, upright, in side-light and out of sunshine. Pictures are always supposed to be seen under those circumstances, you know ; and if you bring a sheet of white paper close to a window, side on, and hold it vertically out of sunshine, you will have as white a surface as you possibly can have over any part of your picture. Now, hold that sheet so that half shall cut against the window-sill or wall, and half against the sky. Then it is white against the wall, and ever so dark against the blue sky ; ever so much darker against the unlighted white clouds ; and utterly black or blank against their bright parts which are full of light. For the paper possesses opaque white- ness, as of chalk ; the clouds possess brightness, as of white fire. Now just consider, when you do a sunshiny landscape, the whitest light you can get on your paper is really darker than the darkest part of the clouds you want to put in your picture ; and also, than the distance of your picture, if you have a five or six mile distance in it. Now, on comparing white paper in a room, looked at as a picture is looked at, with a jam-pot looked at as a copy, you see, at all events, one is as white as the other, or very nearly so, so that the jam-pot is easier than the landscape in the sense of being possible, while the landscape, strictly speaking, is not. And it is highly expedient for me to judge of all your work by
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giving examples quite within your powers. I know the greatest power is shown by contending with the greatest difficulties ; but if you all possessed that, why you know you would be a-improving of me, and not I you.
Now, in this jam-pot, a very good one, the artist, whom I must call No. I, has hit on, or been taught to follow, Rembrandt's, or Leonardo's system. And that system is very well adapted for drawing a simple study like this. No. i sees that her crockery has a small, high light ; that high light is just the tint of her paper; therefore, all the rest of her white wessel has to be darkened and made gray to relieve, and so express the brightness of that high light. For it is glazed, and has caught the light, and all opaque local whiteness yields to a flash. And now you know what a flash, a glint, a reflection on armour, embroidery, or glass, is to Rembrandt ; and you know how valuable he makes it. And this flash on the white glaze gives this drawing value, as a bit of reality : the artist is not wrong in darkening the whole paper for its sake ; but the whole local colour is sacrificed.
But now, is this well-drawn and rounded cylinder, with only one touch of real absolute white upon it, and the rest all gray, and a very black shadow, and a rather black dark side, — is it as like a white jam-pot as No. 2, which is so much less black? I should say not. It is rather rounder, and so has more form. But the eye feels that if it was a part of a picture, it would not look so like what it is as No. 2, because that not only possesses a fair amount of roundness, but is, beyond all dispute, white in colour, while No. I has only one white flash on it. No. 2 economises the darkness for the sake of colour. No. I lays on the shade for the sake of form. No. I loses some of his form in darkness ; the other loses form in light, but gains far more in colour. A landscape with
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distance would be hopelessly heavy and dark in all its near objects on the first principle ; the other is Turner's ; and he (as I observe No. 2 has done) makes his extreme shadow as black as he can ; his lightest surface tint a very thin, local colour, approaching white, and reserves white itself for brightness, or a single flash of actual light in some principal place in his picture. So I bracket these two together as best, and must send a sketch to each of the artists ; only I beg No. 1 to copy No. 2's work, and vice versa. Each will then fully understand all this tirade.
The whole club may do a brown pickle-jar now, on white, as before. No flash of light allowed on it ; con- sequently, no pure white anywhere on it ; sepia only ; and carry a pale tint over all to begin with ; then lay on the shadows. Choose your own subject for the other drawing, but make it as simple a thing as you can per- suade yourselves to do.
And don't use Chinese white in these studies. I should say, do not use it at all on white paper ; never, certainly, till a work is nearly done ; and never till you clearly see your way to an effect with it, which you could not possibly produce without it. But do justice to your own subject in your own way this time. I should like in the first portfolio to see everybody's taste and fancy, and so I give leave for tinted paper, any. subject, and body colour in all forms, on this occasion only.
[I give you notice of the following subject, which I wish the club would do very carefully this autumn ; I have tried the colours, and they come very prettily. A thrush1, with yellow feet, and yellow about his bill, pick- ing coral-red berries in a dark yew ; purple branches,
Or blackbird.
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and masses of heavy green, small interval of blue sky through, all quite near the eye.]
Good-bye, my dear Flora, and tell the club I really think very highly of the work. I have numbered the six best drawings, besides the prizes.
Ever yours,
C. C.
I can come after Christmas, if you like, and will send old Warhawk, whom M. knows. I am only a one-horse man ; but I dare say John will have something for me to ride ; Catapult, for choice, if t'ard mare is still going. But I am very busy now on a big desert subject, which Sternchase approves ; and a canter in the Park before breakfast is all I have time for.
CHAPTER II.
Letter VI. C. C. to F. L,
Tombuie, Gairloch, Ross-shire, October, 186-.
My Dear Flora :
I suppose that you and your club will not do very much drawing in the open air till next spring. I have always thought the sketching season, for students of landscape, like the one crack lesson of the week in a school, in drawing or music ; when the great master whom everybody really believes in, comes and takes every one's work in hand. I dare say you may have found in music, that one lesson of Benedict did your piano-hands more good than several weeks' practice under somebody you were not afraid of. It did so, of course ; because all the practice of those weeks was really done in faith and terror about Benedict ; and that made you really prepare for your lesson. I want you all to do the same, till green leaves come again. Sketch- ing— what we call sketching — is taking lessons of Nature. As to the many meanings of the word ' sketch,' we '11 talk of that another time. Old Ripon's book is generally supposed to give a neat account of them. I have often talked it over with him, and can tell you what will hold good. But now, you must make up your minds (as far
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as I am concerned with what you do) to draw indoors in winter, as you would read music and take piano exercise, with a view to the great Teacher's instructions in spring. Which things are an allegory ; but that 's not my business just now.
Those who are most advanced among you will do well to choose some favourite simple subject, with as little in it as possible, and with not more than two pre- vailing colours, and paint it as strongly and thickly as possible in oils ; or you may use egg or some of the water-colour media in foreground, and white with the dis- tance colours. In fact, if you paint with a transparent medium in front and body-colour farther off", you pass out of pure water-painting into distemper-painting ; and this is what all the English water-colour school are doing. It enables you to use the red sable brush, with all its ad- vantages over the rough hog- hair tool ; and yet you have much of the additional power and depth of oils. But I
only commend this to numbers ■ . For the rest, this
is what I want them to do till next spring, chiefly to wit : —
First, your perspective is shaky all round, except the above-mentioned numbers ; and there are two things you can all do to improve it. Of course you ought to get the Professor's little book1 on the subject, and work through it ; and of course you all regret not to have time. But get a piece — say six inches square — of window-glass, and a fine brush, and mix a little red up with white. Then hold up your glass against a box, or an open book, a house, trees and small landscape, and a succession of such subjects or objects, and accustom yourself to trace the main lines of each subject on the glass, with the
1 ' Elements of Perspective/ by John Ruskin.
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point of the brush and body-colour. Of course the nearer you hold it to your eye, the larger space it will cover. Then copy said lines carefully on paper. That will be the true perspective of the subjects. Do this for a short time, — once a day for a while, — and your per- spective will not be far wrong in your club work.
That 's one thing. Then set a square block on a table before you, six feet off, and make its nearest edge parallel with the edge of the table : sit with the block a little to your left ; then you can see its right side, and its top
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foreshortened. Hold your drawing-paper perpendicular for a moment, covering the object as the glass did ; then draw its nearest face (see the left of diagram) quite flat, in as good proportion as you can judge ; that 's the front of your block which faces you, — the 'eleva- tion ' they call it. But you can also see its top and right side. Therefore draw its top and fit that on to the front ; and then draw its side and fit that on to the top and front ; and that is drawing your block in perspective. Draw it on and through the glass, and you will see that its lines converge in just the same way. Then produce or lengthen the sides of your block and the lines of its top with a ruler : they will meet some- where ; the pairs of lines will run into one. The point where they do that is their vanishing point, and all practical perspective consists in getting lines to their right vanishing points. (See diagram at C and H.) If you will draw an open work-box, with a lid hanging back, and its corner turned towards you, — first by your eye, then through the glass, — you will have examples of perspective lines in all sorts of directions, with the vanishing points where they run into each other. The theory of the thing you can get from lots of books ; but this is the best practice for you.
Then you will ask : How am I to judge the relative length of lines? How much longer is a front line to be on my paper than a perspective line of equal length ? This leads to the very foundation of all sketching ; that is, the habit of accurate measuring by the thumb-nail on your pencil. Sit upright and stretch out your arm at full length, holding your pencil perpendicularly between your fingers, two on each side and the thumb uppermost. That gives you an upright ruler or standard ; and on that you can measure com-
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parative lengths of objects, by sliding your thumb-nail up and down : and it will do just as well horizontally. You must practise this ; for drawing is all measuring : and all measuring of relative lengths may be done most correctly in this way. For instance, to draw a statue by heads, you take the perpendicular height from crown to chin, as your unit of length, and measure it off thus on the body, — say about seven and one half heads long, as we say ; or, if the head is not convenient to measure by, you may take the waist horizontally, — about five and three-fourths to the whole stature.
Try it on your block. I have one before me six inches square, two thick, and to the left of my eye. Sitting over it at the table, I can see its thickness and the whole upper surface ; but, when I hold up my pencil, I find that the whole six inches of retiring surface in the drawing must not be so broad as the two inches of perpendicular thickness facing me. That is what fore- shortening means ; and, the lower your eye is, the more you will have to foreshorten, for the less of the surface at top will you see. But always keep in mind that you must not look on this surface as receding space, which it is, but as all in the same plane as the front elevation or near face ; for so it will be in your picture.
If you will only practise measuring heights and dis- tances with thumb and pencil, whenever you sketch, and make good use of the square of common clear glass, I will answer for your landscape perspective not being far wrong \ ' And, when spring comes round, you must draw a few leaves and sprays as you see them : you will be
1 The glass had better be held like the pencil, or fixed at arm's length from the eye. The distance is easily ascertained ; and a slight
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surprised to find how one really sees leaves edge on and foreshortened. All this is very dull ; but it is a great thing to get some common ready rule of thumb about perspective ; and, do you know, you most of you need one ?
The art schools in London have a small model of a flight of steps, which is, I think, the best example you can have. You can make one by piling up a heap of books of the same size. When you see and show in your drawing, not only that the walls on each side the steps converge towards the top, but that the outlines of the steps converge, then you see like a draughtsman. I hope this may be my stupidest letter ; but please con- sider the nature of the subject, and it 's all for your good. What's worse, I Ve not done yet.
If I wrote about composition, you naturally wouldn't read it. I had rather you would draw from Nature, and pick composition up as you go on. But the sense of perspective has a great deal to do with composition. For instance, one of the first things a man looks for in a picture, especially a landscape, is a way into it, — some- thing to destroy the impression of flat surface. It is contrived in many ways. There is always a road, and people on it at different distances ; or a flock of sheep ; or a foreshortened figure right in front, pointing or squaring his elbows ; or a river serpentining into distance ; or several things converging ; — anything to lead the eye in among the objects on the canvas. That is all perspective. Turner uses tree trunks very artfully, crossing and diminishing them, one behind
frame might be added, for the convenience of setting the glass up before the student, who will find it easy enough to trace lines on it with a long-handled fine brush and colour.
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another, to show a way through a wood. But the most curious thing is the peculiar melancholy of the perspective curves of a quiet river. They seem to lead the eye away into distance with a feeling of infinity, and give such an impression of the wandering unreturning flow of the stream. You must have noticed it, parti- cularly in the evening or morning.
All this is about linear perspective, obtainable by fair drawing. Aerial perspective is really a matter of colour ; though mistiness and obscurity may be had in all manner of ways. And now there are a few things I want you all to consider about water-colours.
All the colours in the box are either transparent or opaque, — at least the semi-opaques are generally used thinly, and made transparent. Opaque, solid, and body colour all mean the same thing. Chinese white, or any tint well mixed with it, is solid : you can't see through it more than through a plate of metal ; and it does not grow whiter when you put on another coat of the same. It shines for itself, as colour, and has a fixed place in the scale of light and dark ; and if you put it over another colour, it does not modify it, but conceals it. Now gamboge or rose madder are transparent. If you put or two coats of either, they are darker than if you put on one ; and, if they be carried over other hues, they change them, but do not hide them ; as, gamboge over blue turns it into green, and does not substitute yellow, as thick chrome would do.
Now, as students, you must all use transparent colour, or the semi-opaques as if they were transparent. As with the jam-pot, so with everything else : you work from light to dark ; that is to say, from the white paper to violet-carmine, or lamp-black. You get light by adding shadow, and form by definition in shadow. Before your
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picture is begun, it is all high light — white paper ; and you paint in coloured shadow, or rather your palest and brightest hues first ; and their (also coloured) shadows afterwards, in shar'p, defining form. Having an oak- branch in spring to paint, I should first paint in emerald green all over its outline form. With a bank of heather, I should put on rose madder with a little blue nearly all over, and work the greens, etc., into that, — lighter and purer first, deeper and browner afterwards. It is quite difficult enough, as I said, to go on this way; because, even here, you have to consider which of the hues is lighter in tint1 and which darker: for example, you have to judge whether the heather flowers are lighter than the green heather tops, and so on. [The only way to calculate this by the eye is to look at the two objects with half-closed lids. There is a point of dim- ness at which the lighter tint is recognisable with certainty.] To translate hue into tint, or colour into grammatical light and shade, is hard enough. But you must do it, or you lose so much form : and you should only think, in drawing from Nature, how you are to get the forms right by painting on right-coloured shadows. The idea is, in water-colour, to get the correct outlines, by painting coloured shade all round them, and complete them by painting coloured shade into them correctly. Whatever you have to colour, take these questions in succession, and answer them in your work : —
i. What hue, and how dark, is the colour of my highest light, — the nearest tint to white in all my subject ? (Absolute white is very rare.)
1 ' Tint ' means pitch of shade, lighter or darker ; ' hue ' variety of colour.
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2. What hue, and how dark, is the tint of the next darkest shadow ; and what kind of shape has it on the object : in other words, hue, tint, and form of second degree of shade?
Then third, fourth, and all of them, — the lighter first,
O T 2 3 4
Fig. 2.
the darker after. Take a figure like this : — you want to paint it in water-colour with those degrees of shade- Well, it is better to begin with tint No. I, the lightest. Carry I all over spaces 2, 3, and 4, and let it dry. Then carry 2 over 3 and 4, and so on, carefully drying be- tween each. Then you will have all your edges quite sharp and clear, which is the soul of water-colour. If you had begun with the darkest, 4, it would have run more or less into the others ; at all events, the out- lines would have been muddy. That is the principle of water-colour, from light to dark.
I suppose you are all pressed for time. That is what every body says. The inference is, that you ex- pect to learn to paint in no time ; and you can't do it. And mind, there is no such thing as amateur work, and allowance for amateurs. I should rather think I was an amateur or lover of painting ; I've given all I had to give to it for fifteen years. And I should say that you were professionals, or had made a profession of intending to learn to draw things right. But work is right or wrong ; and, in so far as it is wrong, it is nothing, except for the caution you learn by it. Now if you
D
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look at the different patches in the second diagram, you will see how they are done, — in pen and ink, with crossed lines, and with an even hand. Now any of you in any spare five minutes (and I've always found that time really runs away from one in grains of about that size) can draw something like that, and practise shading by even lines, first like those at I, then i crossed with other lines diagonisingly, as old Jagger, our keeper, says. Practise that when you can, with anything you like, on anything you like, — pen and ink, HB pencil, chalk, or, best of all, a fine brush and sepia ; the smoother the paper, the better. It is workman's work ; engravers shade things so. Of course you will do the light parts, as your pen gets empty. When you can do steady lines, try to get gradation in pen and ink, so as to pass imperceptibly from light to dark with as many degrees of shade as possible. To do this you must use little dots, which painters call stippling, in between your lines and everywhere ; and in working at speed — and you ought not to be too slow — you will have to scratch out a little with a penknife at last. You may use a steel crow-quill, or a broad driveable steel pen. The whole secret is filling up the little white interstices between the crossed lines. Of course it is tiresome at first ; but you need not do it for long at a time ; and your eyes will grow nicer every day (if that be possible for ladies' eyes). You may see how to do it from the diagram, and I shall ask you here- after to practise the crossed lines on a larger scale, so as to gain freedom of hand.
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Here you have the first two figures from 'Elements of Drawing ;' do the flat shade b first, beginning as at a,
Fig. 3,
then the gradated exercise c from light to dark. Practise both in all ways, that is to say, in pencil, in sepia, and in chalk on a large free scale, and of all sizes, and work, above all things, for skill in cross-hatching lines evenly into a perfectly flat surface.
And, do you know, some of you had much better spend your time in this way than do the sort of drawings I have just received from subjects of your own choosing. As a teacher, one is always told that by making people do simpler and simpler work, one will get them down at last to something they can do right. Well, it may be, if they care for drawing for its own sake. But many of you seem to think of it only as a vehicle of sentiment, and also that it does not matter how ungrammatically sentiment is expressed. You have all read the Profes- sor's sentence (Modern Painters, vol. i. pp. 9, 10) about the early painters ; and think that because you have a pretty thought in your heads, you are as good as Cimabue. You forget that there is a whole renaissance of study and discovery and correct work between you, and that what is excusable and pathetic in a person who has to teach himself is just the contrary in a
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lady who won't take pains. Merely from want of will and methodical practice, some of the numbers seem not to know what right is. I set — — simpler things to do ; and they have done them worse. All the effort and attention are gone : they seem not to be able to get on without excitement ; whereas the essence of all practical art is self-possession. When inclined to gush, try to express your emotions on the piano. If you were to play in the style of some of these drawings, your music-master would flee howling into the wilderness. Or write earnest poetry in shocking bad grammar ; won't the effect border on the grotesque ? Here's a specimen drawing, — a self-chosen subject from Goethe, — Mignon doing something; a little figure out of drawing, with immense eyes which are not a pair, supported by two left legs and feet without any phalanges (ask John what that word means), in a room out of per- spective, and moving about like Wordsworth in a world of background not realised. It 's all sponged and rubbed and smudged and grimed ; in fact, it is a mess. If this sort of thing is sent me any more —
0 Lady Flora, hear me speak,
— I mean exactly what I say, —
1 shall unquestionably seek
A large addition to my pay.
Ever yours, and May's, affectionately, C. C.
P. S. Remember me to May very particularly, and tell her I want to draw her in several capacities. We have been felling the deer on the Cairn-breac ; and I got a big Royal. Rather a rough finish with him : he wasn't
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so dead as he ought to have been ; and, when he felt Duncan's knife, he rose up and jammed Duncan against a rock. He happily clung on to the horns with all his might ; and I threw my jacket over the beast's head, and struck him just right with the skean-dhu at the root of the neck. Duncan just said, 'Ye're a maan to hoont with ; ' and I think the gillies are keener with me now.
CHAPTER III.
Flora. Well, May, you have seen a great deal for twenty-three, — almost everything you've any business to have seen, except —
May. Except what, Floy, — a lover ?
F. Yes ; for you never will look at anybody in that light.
M. What sort of light, dear — couleur dn rose, like toilet curtains?
F. Yes ; most girls would look more kindly at men. At least, you always were kind enough to everybody ; but you do take them so coolly.
M. Oughtn't somebody to come, and make me look the right sort of way at him ? I really think I should learn very soon, if I got the right master. You're thinking of Charles, I suppose. Well, so do I, some- times,—often, if you please. But he is like all the others ; he does not think quite enough about it. His life is all pictures ; and I am only one of his foreground figures. I should like a canvas all to myself. It is men who take us so coolly. At all events, they all pretend not to care ; and we must pretend, too.
F. Well, I wish you'd look at him once as I've seen him look at you.
M. Would he see it, too, do you think? I never did.
This pithy dialogue took place over afternoon tea at Hawkstone. The ladies had ridden to a near meet of
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hounds ; but a short run had ended without a kill, and heavy autumn rain had sent them home alone. They were old friends and dear, with perfect confidence in each other (it is really possible in the country). Yet this was the first time Flora had ever talked to Margaret either about men or any man. She had plunged at the subject with ready good-will, feeling or making her opportunity with dark May, whom she liked all the better because her own decisive spirit could not alto- gether rule her friend's meditative indolence. I have had to make their conversation very staccato ; but inter- esting talks often are, as moments of profound confidence are, but moments, between the best friends ; and they are apt to flash or snap questions and answers at each other as in a French novel. This pair liked, but did not quite comprehend each other. A curious reserve and languor, the more unintelligible to others because she obviously couldn't understand it herself, was one of Miss Langdale's most provoking attributes. People were half afraid of her, she was so tall and grand, and had more in her than met the eye ; and she was tender enough to be vexed about it, more with herself than others. An immense soft-heartedness and pity was one of her qualities ; and early experience had taught her to be very silent about it ; so people thought her a coldish, rather benevolent young lady of business, as Flora said, 'till they knew her form.'
I have read several square yards of various description by eminent hands, in hopes of finding one, or rather two portrait sketches for Florence and May as they sat in the former's room — sanctum or boudoir it could not be called, — because she let anybody into it who was not actually smoking, and who ' respected the threshold in the matter of boots. For furniture and decoration; see
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novels, passim. The ladies are an artistic subject, and will do very well for a book on colour and form.
They say beauty is leaving the old houses in England, and going to the timocracy or democracy. Perhaps so. Neither of these latter were ever a very plain generation ; and the standard is high, from John o' Groat's to San Francisco. But if you see a muster of the North Country at York, you won't think altogether ill of the looks which go with ancient names. And this pair had been pronounced ' crackers ' by highly competent judges at many hunt balls in the glad old city. They were not exactly dark and fair : for both were dark-eyed : but Flora rejoiced in black-brown locks, and that high unchanging colour which depends not on thickness but extreme fineness of skin. May was purple-haired and rather pale, with an occasional brunette blush of the true vermilion tint, which only dark cheeks wear, and they not always. They were cousins ; and the blood and form of the same ancestress of yet unforgotten beauty were in both. They were like and unlike : both had keen, aquiline beaks, and soft, half-humorous faces ; both pairs of eyes were sharp or tender as you took them ; both had tall, rounded figures, with the same look of power in repose ; both liked black and rose, or ivy green and dark brown. One always managed the other in society ; the other always in- fluenced the one in serious matters. They could hardly have done without each other ; and Flora's great object in life, she said, till her girls were out (their present ages were two and four), was to get somebody for May whom she liked herself. This was both a grave home matter and a matter of society ; and it was not easy to see whose taste of the two would be consulted in the end. May was an orphan, — a very independent one in fortune
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and all other matters. She had a faint remembrance of many kisses from her father, swarthy and splendid, in red uniform and epaulets, before he went away so many years ago ; also of a dreadful day not long after, when a letter came that mamma never read to the end. It brought news that papa had died in his saddle, among mutinous Sowars, making many follow on the way he went. Then she had grown up to bring back something of happiness to the sad mother whose whole life was in her, and had learned to care for little else. Lady Langdale had never gone into the world after her husband's death. As she said herself, half of her had died that day ; but enough was left to have May well drilled in many things not often known to ladies of her age. The girl waxed strong in shade. In the presence of a great praying, uncomplaining grief, she learned endless patience, and seemed to grow easily into the experience of a regular , nurse, in the care of her mother's strong mind and broken frame. Not that the sufferer was exigeante or selfish : her daughter was her only hope in the world ; and all her remaining powers went to make the most of her. So May did not want for acquirement. She early found out, that nothing did mamma so much good as her getting on with lessons. So with steady home-work, travel, and good instruction in Rome and Dresden, she had been fairly grounded in what we call education. I take that to consist, for man or woman, in learning the Christian faith, — one's mother-tongue undefiled, a quantum of mathematics, a little Latin, two modern languages be- sides one's own, an art, and a craft. He or she who is grounded in these things will not be helpless ; and May was supremely helpful by the time she was twenty. She would work for people ; she comforted people ; she
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had fits of humour and said things which made every- body laugh ; she did so herself, — rather loud, I fear, sometimes ; ' with a great deep sound like a man,' as Flora complained. Both were in square-cut black velvet gowns, with maize ribbons, and heavy gold ornaments of an old Holbein design which May had contrived with a drunken genius of a working goldsmith, whose wife she had nursed. And they sat in a deep olive- greenish room (if you must have something about it, as a background for them), with dark old oak, some black and dead gold, and blue and white china, and no other colour ; some good and highly-finished water- colours on the walls ; comfortable chairs and ottomans ; a rack near the door of feminine whips, umbrellas, spuds, garden shears ; a dainty description of bill-hook, and something very like a. salmon-rod. Books ad libitum^ a good piano, and a space before the fire for the chil- dren, filled up the large low room ; and Sir John had just such another on the other side of the great door of Hawkstone Holt, — a big house, in a big park, which is all I have to say of it now.
The blue and white tea-service was in full action during the conversation held above ; and the pair were hungry : so that (except an odious comparison on Flora's part of herself and friend to Sarah Gamp and Elizabeth Prig), little else was said before the desired arrival of the evening boy and letter-bag. And then they got Cawthorne's letter just written, and read it, sitting close to each other, on a broad ottoman by the fire, with one great waxlight in a standing candle-table, and all sorts of flashing reflections on their eyes and hair and necks and silk, and all over the room. To- wards the end, Flora invoked her Goodness ; and May laughed her great contralto laugh.
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'Will they stand this sort of lecture, do you think?' she said.
' Oh ! they must ; and it's fair enough. Rather hard on poor Susy Milton : but she adores you ; and you can smooth her over to-night.' She stays here over to- morrow, and ought to be here now.'
Horses, bell,, and arrival of a little person in a habit.
The rest is too dreadful.
Letter VII. F. L. to C. C.
Oct. — , rS6-
My Dear Charley :
You are more formidable than I thought ; and probably I ought to know, as we have certainly quar- relled in our time. But really, now, —
' Oh, hold up your hands, Lord Charley, she said ; For your strokes they are wondrous sore ! '
You are like all critics, gifted with an extraordinary taste for tormenting those who feel it most ; and poor little Miss Milton, who is too eager and aspiring, I know, but very simple, shed tears extensively under the lash about that unlucky picture of Mignon. She came in on May and myself just as we were reading your letter ; and we thought it better to break it to her. She took it and read it, and said something about not having- known it was so bad, and then quietly began to cry. But old May took her in her great arms, and made her sit in her lap, habit, spur, splashes, and all, and put their cheeks together, and said nothing ; and her immense comfortable laziness quite soothed the little party in no time. She only wants to do what's right, she says, and quite insists on your remarks going
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round (I suppose by your putting them on a separate leaf, you meant to leave me the choice of suppression, after I had had the fun ; by all means be as discreet on all other occasions). I think the perspective instruc- tions do make the subject clearer in a practical way : the pen-and-ink lessons will certainly make us all very slow and absent over our letters. But at all events they will be a great help to those who really mean to take pains, and have enough enthusiasm to attain to method, — quite an oracular sentence, isn't it ? I am delighted at having said something like the Professor. Tell us more about your deer-stalking. What do you mean about the Royal ? What is a Royal ? A fabulous animal like a king's arms? And what is striking him all right at the root of the neck ? Did it hurt him ? and if so, how should you like it yourself? And where do you expect to go to, generally speaking?
Yours, as you behave yourself,
F.
Letter VIII. In the same envelope.
My Dear Charles :
Flora is in a great hurry with her guests ; and I am glad she has asked me to write to you about an idea of Ellen Gatacre's. She reads a great deal, you know, and has a high idea of your learning, as well as your execution ; and she says you write well. I am sure she is right, as far as invective goes. But she wants you to write us a nice long letter about the Cinque Cento, or the Renaissance, and to give us, if you can, a clear notion of what the words mean ; or rather to pick out their various uses, and tell us what all the people mean who write
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about the words. It seems to me as if you would have to write quite a book on it, if you once begin ; but you might do it bit by bit, in a series of letters. All of us, I think, make notes of things you tell us; and most of us would gain a good deal by this, if it did not take up too much of your time. There is so much quarrelling about the religious painters and the naturalists ; and one set of people talk about the Renaissance being an anti- religious movement, as if they thought atheism the main object of art ; and others seem to think Masaccio quite wicked, because he is not like Perugino ; and then they say art and criticism have no object but pleasure. I'm sure I don't think so ; for I like drawing very much : and I have generally found pleasure rather disagreeable, at least, in town. We all want you to write us some- thing on this subject ; and I want you further to do something to comfort Susan Milton, who is in a rather desponding way about her drawing. She has never been taught on any system, and seems to have quite a passionate delight in beautiful things, with a blind sort of eagerness to imitate them, which certainly brings her to grief occasionally. She says, till she saw your letters, nobody had ever told her what to do, and promises obedience henceforth. Could you write her a little note through Flora?
Please don't be too rash deer-stalking : I suppose that sort of thing does not often happen ; but Mr. Hobbes has written quite a sensational account of Duncan's and your danger, strength, and valour ; and some of us are rather frightened. He is such a cool, plucky person himself, that one thinks more of what he says. It must be such dreadfully wet, cold work, too ; one of the ladies here said she ' supposed deer-stalkers always wore go- loshes.' Suggest the idea to old 'Tuncan,' whom I
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remember well at Glen Monar, and remember me kindly to him. We were out yesterday with the Gorsehampton- shire, and had a nice little run, keeping a safe place in the third flight. Old Billy Moody showed us our way beautifully ; and. Flora and I quite raced ; she teases me about being a champion of heavy weights. Mariquita galloped and jumped beautifully, and took better care of me than I could of her. Jagger is ill at Red Scaurs ; and two or three of your collier friends want to see you. Do you know, with a little persuasion from you, Mr. Ripon thinks he could get them to sing in the choir ? Bolton must be lovely now : we are going to have an expedition there before leaves are quite gone. Can you write me some verses, — not about myself in particular, anybody will do ? Good-bye ; the children rather want me to play to them.
Ever your affectionate cousin, May.
Letter IX.
My Dear May :
Concerning the Renaissance, I must take time and get home to a library. I have written a line to Ripon, who is a fair historian and critic, and can draw a little, as so few critics can ; they really write about painting as Mr. Gambado did about riding, — 'desiring to add as much as possible to the theory, without resorting to practice !' He, not Mr. Gambado, will tell me what books to look at, and perhaps what to look for and say to you. Then as to Miss M. (whom I remember as a little fair thing, who rode a great deal), I have taken much trouble, and paid, never you mind
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how many shillings, to do a correct drawing from a little Anglo-Highland maid here, whom I think a great beauty. We (her mother and I) stood her up in a dark- blue frock and gray plaid, in just the same pose as poor Mignon in the condemned picture ; and I send the Milton a copy of the outline I made. She may keep it if she likes ; but she had better copy it exactly, and send it and the copy to me (she may get it correct with tracing paper, if she can't any other way ; but dividing her paper into numbered squares, by lines corresponding to those marked I, 2, 3, and a, b, c, along the edges of my copy, will be best). Then, if her outline is passable, I will put the first coat of not too many colours on my sketch ; and she may on hers, and so on. I think that may help her along. She must condescend to method. Genius, you know, does not mean impatience of trouble, but a transcendent capacity of taking trouble. I do assure her I have worked very hard, and by strict dictated method for great part of my time. The 'Fessor's system of instruction, from first to last, with folio illustrations and copies, will be out in a few weeks : and then, if she will follow it, she will get on every day : but that eagerness always thwarts even the most willing and docile people. Of course, where they are conceited too, it is likely to spoil their work altogether ; but she seems very nice and good. You don't suppose I have forgotten Bolton ? Tell me when you go ; it will take you a day to get there from the Shires ; and I shall be coming south in about a week. Old Hobbes is delightful, and has asked Ripon up here for a day or two at the deer. I have got three more since I wrote, two killed quite clean. The other it took us a long day's tracking to get ; and Haco, the Norway terrier (the gillies call him ' Hack,' I'm sorry to say), distinguished himself greatly. He
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held the scent of the wounded beast straight through the tracks of a large herd, and for many miles after, and brought us to him next morning. He lay dead not a quarter of a mile from where we had turned from him (to go to the Rattachan bothy, where we slept), and was as stiff as a biscuit, with a glazed eye like malachite. It took us all day to get a pony to him, and bring him down to the lodge. We grilled and ate some of him on the way, at Rattachan ; but I was glad to get back to dinner with his liver as a bonne bouehe for Hobbes.
There are some other miscellaneous things I wanted to say about the collection in your first portfolio of subjects of your own choosing. One is, that ideas are altogether my aversion ; and I shall be pleased with literal studies or sketches from nature, or the object, and with those only. By a study I mean, generally speaking, a finished drawing of some part of a picture ; by a sketch, an outline, or light and shade drawing, to give a general idea of the intended effect of the whole of a picture. One is a portion complete ; the other a whole unfinished : and that is, I think, the correct meaning of the words. By a picture from nature I mean one from something not made by man ; by one from the object, I mean all studies from casts, or copies of models, or ele- vations of steam engines, if you like. Do these — at least do the first two classes of drawings — from any natural object in, or nearly in, its natural state, and you will certainly make progress. But if you work now at ideal groups, or scenes you haven't seen, you never will do any good at all. And consider that appreciation is not origi- nality or novel invention ; and that what you have just understood and feel as pathetic may have been felt and represented a hundred times over ; so that, unless you can do it again with yet unknown vigour or skill, you
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are in fact wasting time. How many Margarets and Mignons are done every year in a professional and commercial way, but very skilfully ! Verditer, the art- master, or Miss Sienna, the pupil-teacher, know how to paint better than you, because they never do anything else. They get a pretty brunette or blonde to sit to them, and go to South Kensington to copy an old bric- a-brac spinning-wheel ; and what do you suppose is the use of doing the things, or the worth of them when done ? They are useful to the painter, just in so far as he does every touch faithfully from nature or object ; their value to the buyer is just technical, as good or bad painting. And you see, all the feeling in the world will not pre- vent their drawing being more decisive, and their colours better laid on than yours.
But you have the advantage of seeing much more natural beauty than they. You can learn to do historical sketches from nature, to the effect that such and such a rock or tree looked beautiful thus and thus, at such a time. That is realism ; and has true worth : every such sketch is a record of your intelligent delight in God's work ; it has its value, though per- haps no great market value. Of course, in some instances, its worth is obvious. Here is a very good Nile sketch, — sunrise, some maize, desert beyond, and pelicans. All that is new information, fresh, realist knowledge of facts. The things are like that ; and many don't know it till they see the picture. If closely painted, and really true, such a thing is worth more than any ideal figure can be, which is not technically perfect, and an absolute model of hand-skill ; in that it is only for persons of intense passion, and geniuses of heavy calibre to attempt to interpret great poetic ideals pictorially. Stick to your work from nature ; and she will give you
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genuine inspirations of your own now and then : you can't be Goethe by admiring Goethe.
Flora told me which were yours ; and they are like yourself, tender and strong. They are second best of all, nearly first. No. — , which I put foremost by a neck, is as good as I could do, and better. It is a pity that damosel will do nothing but trees and lanes and quiet water ; and she will assuredly go off if she does not learn new subjects. But, as the thing stands, it is more perfect than yours ; for yours is unequally finished. You attempt more, and partly do it ; but she knows exactly what she can do, and tries no farther : hence an even- ness of touch and equality of tone and finish all over, which yours has not quite got. Look well at hers, and you can beat it next time.
Ever yours, affectionately,
C. C.
Inclosure. — I wrote these last September, at Bolton, when you were at Tavistock. I suppose I must call them a Fescennine, as they're not in any metre to speak of.
i.
There 's now and then a red leaf flying,
But the birches are hardly growing sere ; In the pines there 's a gentle southern sighing ;
And we revel in the strength of the year. There are late roses lingering, not fading:
But all through the long sweet day We weary for a {'long' scratched out, but left legible) tall, sweet maiden ;
And she rejoices in the name of May.
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ii.
It is autumn brown ; and the heather
All bronzed and purple with the sun, Sends it strong birds of dark-red feather,
To rattle up, and crow before the gun. Pereunt, like the hours, et imputantur :
They get shot and counted all the day; But, still in spite of all the sport, we want her :
We can't anyhow get on without our May.
III.
She walks by a southern river :
Her feet are deep in southern flowers ; She hears not the birches' scented shiver,
Or the honied whisper of the moors. No ; she gets on well enough without us ;
But, swallow, swallow, fly to her, and say, Though she may not condescend to think about us,
We 're all of us a-dreaming about May.
IV.
What's that springs between the stream and heaven?
— Would you tell me now, O salmon, newly run? Dc you think you 're in a certain stream in Devon ?
And did you jump to see the Lovely one ? You don't say so — fish are uncommunicative;
Let me put twenty yards of line your way; Now show your pluck ,and enterprise, you caitiff,
And rise at me, as I would rise at May.
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CHAPTER IV.
' T3 EADY ! 'ave a care then ! ah, would you, ye brute ?
AV Ready, wor' are then!' Crack of keeper's whip. ' Ready,' a black-and-tan setter, stands looking unutterably dismal, and slobbering after the 'blue,' or mountain hare — now beginning to show signs of change in his white winter fur— which has just started before his nose. Charley steps on a tussock, catches one glance of the victim in the line of a peat-drain, keeps holding where he ought to be for a moment or two, and catches him neatly in the next angle. Bang ! The quick timid thing rolls over unconscious, struck by quick death and onrushing dark- ness invisible. May it be no worse with any of us as to duration and method of the change in question !
Down to charge go ' Ready ' and ' Kiss,' the black-and- tan beauties of the Lewis, pride of the Old Trapper, who may well be proud of them. Charles is reloaded in three seconds from his shot. Pause, hare picked up. ' Hold up, good dogs ; bother to stop for a hare.'
' Fun to hear old Clegg's English rate up here in Ross-shire,' says Dick Ripon, the Oxford divine, endi- manche for six weeks' sport by kind invitation of the mighty Hobbes, who makes grim answer, —
' Yes, Rip ; but don't talk, and spread a little. We haven't shot this ground this year : grouse will lie this warm morning. I want to send off forty brace.'
It was where the coast-road made a turn towards the
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sea, at the beginning of their home-ground at Tom- buie, on Loch Tulla, a bay of the larger Loch Hourn, in West Ross-shire (those lochs are not exactly there ; but their names are very good names, and will do). Looking seaward, the hills of the north of Skye lay purple-gray with gray-golden lights, on a strange steel-blue mirror of sea, dead-still itself, with the magic calms of refraction in distance here and there. The Isle of Mist wore its thin delicate shroud of fair-weather vapour, silver on the golden hills, visible for once in their brightest autumn colours, with every crag and hollow on their sides defined in azure. The spaces of moor were glowing russet : the grassy slopes were pale rich masses of light : the glens lay mostly in deep and viewless blue under the long hill- shadows. Here and there was a reflection on the quiet sea : and far onward were spaces of calm and faint un- dulation, with the heave of the great Atlantic under all, keeping up its undertone of days that were, and days to be, against the mainland rocks below their feet. Green, clear, and unstained, in slumber not of peace, the heavy, unbroken tide washed and sucked, and rolled sinuously along, searching every cranny and recess of the cliffs of pink granite ; and scornfully they let it come and go. The challenge of the northern trumpets, and the endless onset of their white breakers, were nearly due : as it had been, so it would be. Meanwhile, it was a sunshiny morning : and crimson felspar against a green sea made a pleasant contrast enough. In the further offing there was the line of the Long Island, far away to the Butt of the Lewis, with many a jagged dike and seam and horn and beaked promontory, ending in that mightiest pre- cipice of all, which is so specially impressive from the mainland (when you can see it) because of its abrupt perpendicular dive, at that great distance, from high
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mountain-level in a leap to the Atlantic. All round, and far away to where gray light of heaven met gray light of sea, ' the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls, moaned round the melancholy Hebrides,' in the restless faith and hope of overwhelming and devouring them at last ; and gulls and terns, cormorants and guillemots, wailed, sailed, and clanged on the edge of the tide ; and two great black whales were playing and spouting just outside the bay. And Charley and the Reverend Ripon took note of every thing, while the former prepared to go off to take an upper hillside by himself, and the latter to fol- low their mighty host over the grouse sanctuary, — the favoured beat by the sea l.
1 These were Charley's plans for a water-colour, some day, on the scene as he saw it that afternoon, during luncheon on the higher moors : —
A long-shaped picture, rather narrow. Paper washed with yellow ochre and light red first ; then blue sky, faint ultramarine and white, to edges of cumulus clouds, their shadows ultramarine and rose-madder; then all shaded parts of distant hills same, but deeper and bluer than cloud-shadows. Let dry, and gradate on lights of distance with rose and yellow ochre. Draw on all detail, — in the shadows with ultramarine ; in the lights with carmine. Glaze rose and cadmium, or yellow only, till all falls together. Repeat detail, and stipple where necessary.
Middle distance is all sea. Gradate on cobalt and emerald-green ; glaze yellow ochre over in lights ; deepen darks with rose and ultra- marine ; work in indigo and Indian red to darken further, towards back and foreground. A small island, purple shadows, carmine and cobalt first, golden lights over them (yellow ochre, rose, and a little white) ; then coloured lights and shadows in subdued contrast, with faint purple-grey reflection in green sea.
Foreground. — Lights first, pink granite ; then, to get rid of papery look, go over the whole, leaving lights, with warm gray shadows, — raw sienna, light red, and indigo. Dark parts decidedly stronger than darkest parts of sea. Leave forms of foreground rocks, — cobalt, light red, and a little yellow ochre (black or lake may be added to this grey, in the smallest quantity). Draw rock forms ex-
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They had a fair middle distance and foreground. This is a painter's book, and a kind of painter wrote it for such kind of people ; and it pleases him to have as many pictures in it as he can. Wherefore think of the sea-distance as all gray, and the middle distance as all sea. By gray I mean gold and purple veiled in gray mist and light, toning deeper from the sea-hori- zon into heavy purple and green ground-swell, with white foam breaking out here and there indolently ; then pink granite meeting the surf, and swart heather and blaeberries clothing the granite with rolling swells of heather. There were, last, spurs of great moun- tains inland, enclosing sheltered lawns and larger or smaller 'waters,' thrust north and south by the ribs of the hill in their westward course, and whispering or thundering to the sea, according to the state of the rain- gauge. In and out of these little glens, or bays, gnarled Scotch firs, and old birch, and stunted little oaks, grew, or, at all events, persisted in asserting their existence, and proclaiming their obedience to the usual laws of vegetation. There the roe-deer lay warm all day, and the early cocks rested first in autumn ; and the heron stood at ease on whichever leg he liked ; and the ouzels cut in and out, black and white, like hard-working curates ; and seal and otter harboured in the sea-caves, and the badgers among boulders and oak-roots. They were blessed places, all short sweet grass and honeyed heather. And where the rough road crossed the upper end of one of them ; by a gray lichened bridge with a
actly, and be very careful with their perspective, to get solidity and distance. Two stags ; near one rather exaggerated in light and shade,— light red and burnt umber, perhaps darkened with violet carmine. Study heather and stones carefully, — pink, green, and gray, but not too much varied.
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broken parapet ; above a brown and white torrent, whirl- ing like black oil in its last pool before a tormented course of rapids ; and under a great flat-headed pine, whose roots held the granite in the grip of a vice for ten feet perpendicular to the water's edge — the shooting- party divided till luncheon. Cawthorne went inland with Duncan and a gillie, Duncan consenting to awake from his usual dream of deer, and shoot grouse like a shentle- mans : fair second-rate shots both. Hobbes, who was first-rate, took Ripon with him, because he could'nt shoot at all, but was safe, obedient and good company. He was an excitable sort of over-quick man, who either missed clean or killed dead. ' I don't much care which he does,' Hobbes used to say ; ' one or other is all right ; only don't let us have any mere cutting and wounding.'
Nature had certainly supplied the Rev. Richard Ripon with an unusual amount of nervous vivacity ; and a life of considerable variety— between short delight, heavy grief, travel, and scholar- work — had landed him, at forty, in a big town parish, where dirt, distress, distraction, ringers, singers, and clerk, charities, choir, church-war- dens, and mephitic old ladies, had pretty well drawn on the remnant of his heart and brains. The latter, he said, all went into sermons : the former had come to an end long ago ; and now he had no more than Me- phistophiles : his work and his digestion were all that was left him. He was pretty well alone in the world. He wanted to live between High Church and Low Church, and had become a kind of ecclesiastical Ishmael, except that men liked him for a certain quickness of sympathy, which made him a good listener, and perhaps somewhat of a humbug. So it was, that many whom he much regarded first left him, and then abused him by way of finding a reason. He sent a little money to
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the Rev. Damascenus Ignifer ; and so one section of his parish went off to the Rev. Allfire Hammerantongs. He went and talked to the Rev. Allfire's school about a trip to Mount Sinai ; and the scandalous fact was duly notified to his High Church friends by the Rev. Dama- scenus's sisters, and guilds, and acolytes, and preaching fathers. Finally, he went and preached his usual sort of sermon for Mr. Newbroom, who was suspected of intellectual scepticism. Newbroom's adherents thought him conventionally orthodox : in fact, he was pronounced a Laodicean on all hands. It does no good to be over- independent, unless you show it by universal aggression. If you try to work with everybody, people think you are trying to court everybody. But as the Rev. Rip had a quick eye for character, and a tolerably sharp tongue on occasion, a sufficient income for his limited wants, and a pretty free hand, — why, they tolerated him, as a rule, or abused him strictly behind his back ; and he had read the ' Arabian Nights ' to far too good purpose ever to look round.
Finding himself little regarded by anybody except his own poor and the boys in general (he was great at school-treats and prizes for swimming), the Reverend by no means refused sport when he could get it. He rode a good horse, mostly in Port Meadow : till very lately he had never shot or hunted south of Tweed, except now and then at a Yorkshire grouse-drive ; and he had no home-amusement except landscape- painting, of which he had a fair student's knowledge. But salmon-fishing, or a day at the deer, he said, would have been his heart's delight, if he had had any heart, or been capable of delight And so the great Hobbes, who was the kindest of men to everything he considered a man, used to ask him to Tombuie late in
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the season. Charles and he were near connections, and were held together by a dead hand and dear. So the three were sufficiently merry men, and made the most of a golden October in the West Highlands. It was a pleasant time : Ripon said he knew how good it must be ; for he caught himself nervously holding on to the hours, and wishing they would not go so fast.
This day, at all events, the hours and the dogs were quite fast enough for him. Grouse-shooting on rough moors, where birds lie scattered, is one of the hardest exercises that can be taken. The effort of sticking to wide-ranging fast setters, through deep heather, and up long slopes, is severe, to say the least ; and the excite- ment of shooting tells on a stranger, though his condition and skill be ever so good. None of the party were ill pleased as they crossed the last ridge, or beallach^ as the Gael have it, and saw the scattered trees and thin smoke which indicated that Tombuie Lodge was within a mile or so, and that dinner was preparing at Tombuie.
'Down hill all the way now, and first-rate ground, not touched this year,' said the host. 1 Have a good nip of sherry, old man, and shoot your best now : kill dead, or let 'em go. It would be heart-breaking to have to follow up ; and we can't spare time to look for runners. Twenty- five brace, you said, Clegg ? '
' That, and five hares, three teal, two couple snipe, two and a half black game, seven plover,' said the keeper.
' Very well : let Ready and Kiss loose again then, and take up the young dogs.'
A few more grouse were realised ; then there was a pause till they reached a small tarn near home. Clegg was beginning to look blank — when first one and then the other setter stopped as if they had been shot. 'To ho ! 5 low and steady. Hobbes gets round,
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heading the dogs, who are stiff and bristling, with starting eyes. Whirr-cock-cock-cock-cock ! The two old birds and a well-grown young one rise and fall promptly. T Master is as usual ; and Rip holds straight this time. Whirr-r-r-r-r ! five more close to- gether. Rip's first barrel slays two ; his second goes, he has never ascertained where ; the long one kills with his right, and is just too late for his left barrel. How many 's that ? ' Hold up, Kiss ! ' Kiss won't move. ' There 's anither, sir.' The ither gets up at Rip's feet, who fires too soon, and misses clean, seeing the bird fall to Hobbes' shot a second after. ' Seek dead ! ' and the dogs bestir themselves. Seven birds down before they moved : pretty, to finish with. Of all fun, there is nothing like breech-loaders and an accommodating covey of grouse; and the picking- up afterwards has its charms for tired men and animals.
But few more shots were fired before they reached the long straggling woods, a sanctuary of roe-deer ; and there they gave over shooting, with thirty brace of grouse, and et cceteras. As they passed the kennels, they heard Charley's voice and whistle, and watched him and his men skipping and splashing among the black and green channels of a peculiarly deep bog, which had existed time out of mind close to the road and shooting-lodge, undrainable and ill to pass. Charley presents himself, however, looking browner and leaner than usual, in a jerkin of Fraser green, like bent-grass, with the small glass and compass he always affects, and a saw-backed skene-dhu attached to the same ; all stained and ' sore with travel,' — the sort of man who has trodden the hills, and felled the deer, ever since the bronze age, or thereabouts. He has got thirteen brace of grouse, and four of ptarmigan, sparing hares for a
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general beat at the end of all things. All are tired and hungry, and right little is said till dinner, and then still less for a considerable period ; that is to say, till loch oysters, hare-soup of extreme density, salmon steaks, and a glass of chablis, with a circulating pewter, have per- formed their orbits, and a red-deer haunch takes their place. It is the hunter's mess. None of them have touched beef or mutton for three weeks, except the Sunday steak, which is regularly forwarded from Inver- ness — as a matter of ritual. 1 And hereon ' (as we believe it is written somewhere in the Morte d'Arthur, or other ancient chronicles) ' the knights ate strongly by the space of an hour or thereabout, until they wellnigh swooned,' but were revived by a snipe apiece, apple-pie, sherry, oat-cake, and butter, and the final pewter. Then there were two tumblers and a cigar each ; Rip was lectured about his shooting ; the dogs and their doings were exhaustively discussed ; and they would all have been fast asleep in five minutes more, if tea and the late letter-bag had not arrived.
' Your club's at you, Charley. I see Lady Latter- math's hand and seal,' said Ripon, who had soon dis- posed of his limited correspondence, — one letter from his curates ; another, in large text, from Master Walter Ripon at school ; and a bundle of proofs which he put in his pocket ' for the next wet day, if the river wouldn't fish.'
' Well, it concerns you, rather. They want me to write them a paper on the Renaissance. Just the thing for you : they all believe in you to any ex- tent.'
' Might as well write a history of modern Europe : that's what it means.'
' Haven't you got any old lectures or talks about
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Holbein or Michael Angelo, or old reviews, or anything of the sort?'
' Well, I've got proofs of a lecture on the " Cinque Cento" up stairs: that means the same thing in com- mon language, you know. There's no reason they shouldn't have it, except that " The Oracle of Crotona " is sure to be down on it ; and I suppose they won't care for it after that.'
' None of us read " The Oracle," that I know of : that's the best cure I know ; like Persian powder for fleabites.'
' Well,' said Hobbes, with a mighty yawn and stretch, ' it seems I must go and stump Gorsehamptonshire on 3rd November; and I shall want to be home a week before. Let's all go south on the 28th at latest : Glas- gow steamer calls then. We really ought to leave off salmon-fishing soon ; the stags will be getting too far on ; the cocks won't be here in time for us ; besides, the fine weather can't go on for ever. Come home with me, either or both of you ? You'll be of use if there's much talking to do ; and there are some pheasants. It's nice to have you.'
' Thank you ever so, but there are my old women ; and Charley has his young ones to lecture,' quoth Rip. ' I think you had better not have men to speak who don't belong to your county ; nest-ce pas ? I should like to write anything for you, though.'
' Halloo, here's the Susanette been breaking her heart because I abused her picture. How was I to know it was hers ? '
'You're always falling out with Miss Milton,' Hobbes observed. ' Don't you remember how angry she was when you told her her apron-pockets made her look marsupial ? You'll be falling in love with each other next.'
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' You think that likely ; don't you now ? But I must write her something pleasant, or, rather, write it to Flora. What's to be done to-morrow?'
' Hark, there's heavy rain ! Fish the Blackwater, if it clears enough by the afternoon ; try and drive Slioch Muick if it don't: — a half- day or off-day anyhow. You'll have time to write.'
' Well, I had a club letter nearly ready ; but I think I must write another to go before it, and address myself to a lot of their mistakes.'
' There's Rip gone to sleep. Wake up, old man ; have some soda-water; and let's all to bed.' Exetint.
Charley's letter next day has already been reported at Hawkstone : his earlier one was nearly to the fol- lowing purpose : —
Letter X.
TOMBUIE, Oct. 12.
My Dear Flora :
There was an omission in my last letter about your learning practical perspective by drawing outlines of things on and through a square of glass ; or rather, I have thought of a new dodge with the said glass. When you have got it, wash one side of it over with strong, clear gum-water, and let it dry thoroughly. Then take a steel crowquill, or a mathematical pen, or anything fine, and draw on the film of gum a scale of squares, quarter-inch size, — say a dozen each way, — numbering each square. Then, if you hold that up against any object, and have your paper squared in pencil, in half-inches, inches, or more, you will be able,
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first, to alter, the size of anything you are drawing, and draw it again to scale in exact proportion. You cannot think how your eye will gain in accuracy by this means. And then, secondly, you will be able to practise por- traits all this winter. You see, if you hold up your squared glass at your sitter, and get the corner of his eye on one of the lines, you can determine all his distances at one view : it will show you on your squared paper where all the points and corners of his face are. It will be good practice for all the best of you.
I find the following passage in Hamerton's ' Thoughts about Art.' I always held that a certain knowledge of figure-drawing was necessary to every landscape-painter, and indeed to every draughtsman. I believe I got the notion from Armitage's ' Evidence to the Royal Aca- demy Commission' : if that did nothing else, it drew out a number of good ideas. But this sort of dictum from one crack landscape-man, and through another, is of importance to you, and to all the club. I will make you a set of instructions for portrait as soon as I can ; but Ripon's Renaissance lecture, or essay, must come next after this. The Stray Rook, as Hobbes calls him, was ready in a minute. What he does, he can generally do quickly. But thus says Hamerton : —
{ The study of landscape is not a good initiation into the technical art of painting. Mr. Peter Graham, one of the most thoroughly accomplished landscape-painters the world has ever seen, told me that, in his opinion (and I am profoundly convinced of the truth and justice of the opinion), landscape does not afford good material for early study, on account of its extreme intricacy, and the difficulty of determining the exact value of what you have done. He believes, and so do I, that the shortest road to good landscape-painting is an indirect road ;
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and that he himself got his first initiation into the mys- teries of landscape-effect through constant observation of the delicate play of light and shade in a gallery of statues. He earnestly recommends the practice of pro- traiture as the best of preliminary training. It is a com- plete mistake to go to landscape under the impression that it is easy. The naked figure, difficult as that also is, is a simple object in comparison with a forest or a mountain. We ought to proceed, in study, from sim- plicity to intricacy ; and the great difficulty in landscape is to find anything that is simple enough for early study.'
This is, of course, particularly directed to those who want to study landscape in good earnest I am sure it will be good for all such persons to begin by learning to draw the figure ; though as to difficulty, you will hardly persuade me that a figure in action is not worse than any mountain. But now, if you don't mind, I think I must talk in this letter about very common things and opera- tions in pencil or water-colour. You know, as I told you, there is no such thing as amateur art ; only skilful or unskilful, good or bad. And much of the work you send me is so far unskilful as not to be quite good. Things are brought nearly right at last ; the desired effect is so far produced, that I know what the artist meant to do. The work was intended to express an idea, and it does express that idea : many of you get so far as that. But the eye of a skilled critic (I suppose I am that to a certain extent) demands to be pleased with the working as well as the work. Things are sent me which have been patched, re-done, and worked out, sometimes well and conscientiously ; and I give all credit to their authors for doing their best. But there are a few of the strongest among you who often do things quite right, without undoing or re-touch ; and that is a higher state of
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things. And one or two have got so far that I can really rely upon them ; that is to say, I know their minds follow their brushes. I can see every touch ; and all their touches mean something, or are part of a meaning. That is good painting : but very few of you ever keep it up through a large drawing ; whereas, many of you want methodical certainty of operation, and nothing but practice will give it. Watch any good workman in water-colour. How the paints always mix and flow from his brush ! what clean lines and touches ! he has so few accidents or messes ; he seems to get the right pitch of shade, and the right hue of colour, all at once. How fast he gets on, from never having to do a thing twice, and so on ! All that strikes one in look- ing at anybody pushing on some part of his picture when he has studied it before, and knows all the ropes. This is what you really want, most of you, and what makes the difference between what we, or the papers, call 'professional' work, and 'amateur' work, — that the professional is certain, methodical, and, perhaps, rather cool and easy, about all minor and preparatory opera- tions ; while the amateur is uncertain and excited. Nothing but practice will give you certainty ; and I have written down certain practices for you all.
EXERCISE I.
First, in chalk, or broad pencil. Get a board, — a black one, or white one, whichever you like. Put it on an easel, and draw a square on it with a piece of chalk or charcoal ; then draw a circle round the square. Draw from the shoulder, without resting your hand : never mind how difficult or impossible it seems. Do it on a large slate, if you like, or on the wall, or anyhow ; only
F
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hold your charcoal as you would your umbrella, and use it freely from the shoulder. What you can't do one day, you will begin to do the next, and do well in a week. (N.B. — It is easiest to draw a circle in two halves, upper and under.) So all curves : whenever you can, draw them by pairs or halves. Always do so in copying decorative patterns.
Second, draw a square six inches in diameter on the wall, and shade it, from the shoulder, to a flat surface, by even parallel lines only.
Then try it diagonisingly, this way, and that way.
You can do this for five minutes at a time, and it will soon give you such clearness, courage, and neatness of work in your drawing, as will cheer you all through it ; you have drawn enough to know what it means to feel stronger at your work. The fact is, that nothing exer- cises the connecting nerves between the eye and hand, whatever they are, so well as this practice from the shoulder. It is a step towards the real painter's para- dise on earth, — being able to do what you want. You may be sure that the terms ' brilliancy of touch,' ' fresh- ness,' ' abandon,' and the rest of it, express real things. May's study of eggs now before me has these qualities. It means that the performer saw with pleasure, as she did her work, that it was going right, doing well ; and, so to speak, let her hand fly. Well, then her hand put on the right force of touch, and just squoze the right quantity of colour out of the brush in the right place : I'm sure I can't say how. Confidence, quickness, pre- cision,— all those words and things have something to do with it.
Well, ponder hereon, and rejoice therefore, and all that. But now, half of you do not know how to lay washes of colour on in gradation. It is a mere matter
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of practice : nobody does it by nature. If anybody could, some of you might do it ; for you have all enough feeling, which means wish to do it. You all think in your hearts that you have so much more feeling and aspiration and passion than working-artists have. Of course you have. Your art is play, or, at most, holiday work. Not but that it is real exertion while you are at it ; but you don't live by it, and its failure would only vex you, and not half starve you. You do it with all your heart, as children run and jump with all their hearts ; but, if children were obliged to run and jump all day for their bread and butter, they would not be so hearty. You see it is a greater and more difficult thing to get enthusiasm into one's life's work than it is into one's life's recreation. Now as to gradating colour. All the club, except Nos. 1-5 on enclosed list, ought to practise something of this kind with a good red sable, and not on rough paper, which I object to altogether.
EXERCISE II.
Get a quarter-sheet of paper properly stretched on a board ; or a good sketching-block (only with this latter you must use as little water as possible, for fear of wetting the gum with which the sheets are fastened one to an- other) ; moisten the surface with a flat brush and water ; do not drench it, but wet the whole. Slope it, and let it dry till colour will not run on any part of it. Mean- while prepare a small saucer half full of a light tint of sepia. Have clean water by you, besides that which you have used, and two rather large brushes (I am always for red sables). Fill one of them nearly full, mixing your tint up to the last moment ; and begin to lay it on across the paper at top, in light steady strokes,
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diagonally downwards from right to left, or any way you like ; only make them flow evenly into each other, so as to spread the tint without lines or spots. (When you find a wash of colour dry in blotches or clouds, it is always because your tint was unevenly mixed in the brush, so that there were more particles of sepia in one part of the brush than another ; or because your brush was fuller in one place than another, and therefore laid more particles on there : so do not fill your brush too full at first, and feed it again before it is empty. Never allow yourself to be careless in this, when you are laying on broad surfaces of colour) .
Well, when your first brushful is nearly gone, take the other brush with clean water, and drop two or three drops of it into the tint ; then mix up all with the working-hmsh., and lay that on, carefully running it into what you have on already : the result will be gradation into a lighter tint. Go on that way all over the paper, dropping clean water into the tint with the clean brush, and always mixing up with the working-brush. You ought to get to the bottom of your paper with clean water in your working-brush, and a perfect gradation from shade to light all over your paper. It will surprise you to see what a luminous effect the brown wash will give by mere gradation : it will be quite transparent, so that you can look into the paper. Let it get quite dry, and do it again — as with the others which are coming.
Then try it with any sunset-blue tint, — say cobalt and rose-madder. Go over your paper with it as above. Then let it get quite dry. Don't hurry it at the fire, but let it dry of itself. Meanwhile mix up some yellow ochre and rose, or cadmium yellow, if you like. I think myself there's more light in yellow ochre. When you have got the pale crimson or warm yellow you fancy,
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slope the paper the other way up, and go over it from the bottom the other way, over the blue. The result ought to be a perfectly bright and flat sunset sky.
Now you ought all to practise skies thus. As you get more skilful, try it this way : Lay on the cobalt and rose-madder for about an inch of your paper ; then drop in the clean water as above, and also, with the point of the working-brush, take up a little more rose-madder ; mix up, and lay on, thus substituting that hue in the brush for the cobalt. Do it again and again till your wash is pink instead of blue ; then, if you have room, substitute yellow in the brush for pink in the same way; dipping the working-brush slightly in yellow ochre every time you drop in the clean water with the clean brush, and thoroughly mixing up each time.
Of course I don't want to limit you to sunset colours, or any colours in particular. Here are some sky and cloud gradations. For clouds, you can always paint them on to your gradated sky, or take their lights out (always to planned form), with a firm short-haired brush. (N.B. — Have long-haired and pointed sables to lay on with, short ones to take off with.)
FLAT SKIES FOR PRACTICE : FAIR WEATHER, GRAY ON HORIZON. PROCESSES.
a. Flat wash of yellow ochre and a little brown madder (or light
red). Lay on evenly all over the paper. Let dry.
b. Mix cobalt and white. Gradate as above, coming to clear water
two-thirds down the paper. That will be your horizon. Let dry, and slope the other way.
c . Rose-madder, cobalt, and a little white. Begin at horizon, and
gradate rapidly, so as to go over the cobalt with a very light tint. Let dry.
d. Then, if you want light, fair-weather clouds, take out their forms
with brush and clean water, and beware of taking off too much, or anything except in a planned form. Never think of inventing clouds, whatever you do : they won't stand it.
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e. Having got the bright sides of your clouds, put in their faint shadows with rose madder and cobalt. You cannot be too cautious in these two last operations. The main difficulty, and it is considerable, is to take off and put on little enough at a time. If you do either too much, your cirrus comes pushing forward out of heaven right in your eye.
You see we have already got out of flat practice-washes of colour into forms ; and those sadly difficult ones. I could not make and send you drawings of cloud-forms, without much time and labour, — more than I can afford at the price. But you can all of you try to draw with pencil only, the forms of white cirri or small lower clouds, sometimes. You won't have much to show for it, for which I hope you will not care ; but you will learn very much. If you want copies on paper, none are nearly so good as those at pp. 120, 122, 125, vol. v. of 'Modern Painters.' Study those cloud-chapters with all your hearts. (The club ought to have at least three strongly bound copies of vols. iv. and v., and send them about for reference.) I must give you another sky, or beginning of a sky : the forms you must observe, and put in for yourselves ; or find them in ' Modern Painters/ or in Turner's ' Liber Studiorum,' where you can find anything in landscape, if you look.
STORMY TOWARDS EVENING. EXERCISE III.
From top of paper to half down it, mix, and gradate to nothing, light red, cobalt, a little indigo (or lamp- black). Let dry, and slope the other way. Begin again from about one-fourth down the paper as it lies reversed. Now gradate over the gray to nothing with a little ver- milion and yellow ochre; you will see how it will lighten and warm up the gray. Then put some rolling forms
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into the clouds, with both the tints mixed together, — faint, faint everywhere, but faintest towards the light. To know the forms, you must look for them — in Nature, in 'Modern Painters,' or in Turner, or any good modern work you can get at. I cannot send you them in wood- cut ; and, after all, I do not care very much to do so, as it is utterly inadequate. As sketchers, you are vowed to the duties of observation as well as imitation : in- deed, you may be called an Observantine Sisterhood ; and it will do you all the good in the world to draw cirri or cumuli in pencil outline.
One more gradation exercise. Ripon was after deer on some very green hills the other day. He got a tolerable stag of eight points after a long stalk, and came home without a dry thread, of course, having been in that state from nine to nine, or thereabouts. The forester got a touch of rheumatics, and Rip lost his voice. When he got it again, he told me that he had been in some degree comforted, while lying on wet brackens, and being rained upon, by seeing the beautiful grada- tions of green hills looming through volumes of gray mist. He made me a nice note of the colours, — cobalt, light red, and indigo gradated to nothing first for mist ; then a wash of vermilion and yellow ochre all over (drying between, of course, for light on mist) then upside down ; and emerald green and yellow ochre, gradated to nothing from the bottom of the paper, till it vanished in the gray mist. He put in a firm sort of purple-gray rock-foreground, with green ; and it made a very good sketch indeed. He has written what we consider a screamer, about the Renaissance, with new lights of course ; and read it to Hobbes and me, after shooting. We all went to sleep ; Rip first, I think. But in the morning I thought his paper worth reading: it is Pr a
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lecture somewhere. But he has let me copy it for you, and I will send it in my next.
If you will do these exercises faithfully, they will teach you the use of water-colour, used thinly and in distance ; and, further, you will get a notion from some of them what an advantage it gives a picture in breadth and impression, when there are only two or three colours in it, well varied in tint and tone. To give a notion of this I add two very plain contrasts.
EXERCISES IV AND V.
One is the gray, as above (cobalt, light red, and a touch of indigo), slightly gradated, and left in faint streaks, with the faintest yellow ochre, and some light- red gradated on at the bottom. That would make a nice beginning for a picture of rain over sands. I wish some of you would take up that subject, and see what you can do with the above colours. The other is the first stage of a sketch of frost-fog in the evening, with the tint of a sheet of ice below. Do it in this order : Gradate on the gray as usual ; then invert, and do same with rose-and-cobalt purple at bottom, leaving a space between very light ; let dry ; then begin at top with water, taking in a little rose and yellow ; make it a telling pale crimson on the lightest part ; and then gra- date off to nothing at horizon. A few half-drawn figures, or a sleigh, or some wild geese, with some white touches on the ice, would make this quite a picture.
I want to see if you can make these exercises of use. You need not have copies of them sent round, that I see, if you will take them one by one, read them de- liberately, and get your colours and things all ready to your hand before you begin them. The handiness. of
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water-colour is a great temptation and difficulty in the long-run : one is always being led into rash beginnings before one is ready, from pure impatience to be at it, and because one can hit the right tint easily. Take all these skies seriatim, as soon as you have learnt to gradate with sepia : it will be, at least, first-rate practice for you all ; not only because it will make you neat-handed, quick, and methodical with brushes and saucers, but because it will educate your eyes, and you will see so much more gradation in all hues. You all want more of that faculty ; very few painters have ever had enough of it. So be content, go to work with the mixed tints as I have written them, and you will see how they come out.
Then, as you gain exactness of hand, begin to draw rain as clouds, cumuli or those great heaped-up masses one sees after thunder. Cobalt for sky round them, with, perhaps, a little emerald green, and white in it ; faint Indian red and indigo for the cloud shades. Be very care- ful about the forms ; never mind their changing, which they do every minute. Make an outline, settle where the high lights shall be, and run your palest shade over everything else ; then you must look at the sky again for forms to suit what you have got ; for the first will be gone for ever. All that's bright fades ; but a cloud is never the same for ten seconds together. If you must have copies, ' The Liber Studiorum ' is the book for you, with 8 Modern Painters,' vol. v.
Ever your cousin, C. C.
CHAPTER V.
Letter XL
TOMBUIE, Oct. 20.
My Dear Flora :
I enclose Rip's paper on the ' Cinque Cento ; or, Renaissance.' The old Rook has made it very long ; but, as he says, the word may mean any thing in the mental and spiritual history of Europe since Theo- doric : so it might have been worse. How jolly Lady Ellen will be spelling out his periods, in that cursive hand one never can read ! It saves me writing any more now, except about what you call ' a study of eggs,' which you have just sent : at least, it has just come to hand. When you send that sort of thing by post this way, please don't write any thing extra on the cover. For come reason or other, ' Not to be forwarded ' was written on your envelope ; and the post-master here, who is a literal-minded man, never sent the packet up to the lodge accordingly ; and only ' wondered,' as he said, when we blew up about it, 'that it iver cam this far.' Now, about these eggs : it seems to me you ought all to remember the episcopal observation recorded by Sam Weller, that eggs is indisputably eggs, and that, consequently, a study of eggs ought to be a study of eggs, and have nothing to do with a nest. Two or three
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of you have sent pretty drawings of green nests, red berries, feathers, &c., and not studied the eggs at all, which altogether avoids the real intention of the subject. If I had given it, I should have said what sort of eggs, — a hen's and a duck's, with a plover's or rook's, I think. But here is a large gull-egg with strong black markings on it ; and I like it very much, because the artist has kept the white very white indeed, with delicate shades of rounding, and has, moreover, gradated the black marks on Turner's system, mentioned in my first letter, as you may remember. I said there that Rembrandt or Leonardo would have made the shaded side of the white egg quite black, to secure its looking as round as pos- sible, not caring to keep it as white as possible. They would have had the black marks all round it scarcely darker than the shade. Veronese would have had his white ever so bright, even in the shade ; but his egg might have looked rather flat, and he would have painted his black marks quite black, evenly all round. Turner would keep his white carefully up, but slightly gradate his black for the sake of roundness ; and his is, after all, the truest way.
One or two of you have odd notions of size. Here are some eggs specified as Brahma, very nice and clear in colour ; but it has apparently pleased Brahma to make his hens lay eggs no bigger than rooks, unless, indeed, the basket is intended to be the size of a clothes- basket. Then somebody puts some very good eggs in a pan with too much red reflection on their lower sides ; and somebody else puts hers in a cabbage-leaf with no green reflection at all. What an odd arrangement, — all one upon another! Something must have excited the chicks, or the eggs are going cracked.
My American friends have just sent me some autumn
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leaves from Vermont, of the most intense and wonderful colours. I shall have some of them mounted on card- board, and send them round for studies. Respect this.
Ever yours affectionately, C. C.
MR. RIPON ON THE RENAISSANCE.
I was once an Oxford tutor of what is now the old school ; and I remember we used to say, when newer lights forced on our minds the fact that 'Aldrich's Logic ' was full of mistakes, that the book and its errors ought to be preserved, because they led to 'necessary explanations.' I can't say much for this defence ; but I am inclined to think that the use of the words ' cinque cento ' can only be excused in the same way. As most of us know, it is an equivocal term. In the first place, one has to stipulate that it shall mean fifteen hundred instead of five hundred ; then, when one has got leave to mean three times as much as one says, one is involved in the tiresome confusion which always results on our accu- rate habit of ticketing the ages by what human nature must for ever consider the wrong figures. To us the fifteenth century means all the years from 1400 to 1500. To an Italian the C. C. means from 1500 to 1600, be- cause all those years begin with fifteen, as they are written. We are right, of course ; but the Italian way seems to me more pleasant somehow. It" is the way of a painting nation, which thinks by eye and by symbol, not always by grammatical words. The visible symbol 5 has prevailed over thought and memory : it seems that the century which is distinguished by 5 must be the fifteenth, and not the sixteenth.
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' Cinque cento,' then, says the Imperial Dictionary, •'literally five hundred, is used as a contraction for fifteen hundred, — the century in which the revival of the architecture of Vitruvius took place in Italy ; and it is applied to distinguish the architecture of the Italo-Vitru- vian school generally. In decorative art, a term applied to that attempt at purification of style, and reversion to classical forms, which was introduced towards the middle of the sixteenth century, elaborating the most conspicuous characteristics of Greek and Roman art, especially the acanthus scroll and grotesque arabesques. . . . The term is often loosely applied to ornament of the sixteenth century in general, properly included in the term " renaissance." '
So let us get rid of the term 'cinque cento,' and plunge into the various meanings of the term 'renaissance,' ' renascence,' ' revival,' ' renewal,' as various writers are variously pleased to call it. The disputes about the word, and the ideas which are connected v/ith it, have made it a thoroughly equivocal word. Everybody speaks of the renaissance of art according to his notion of what true art is. On that question, men are unhappily of many minds and of all shades of difference. For the present, the narrowest sense of the word must be the one we have had ; that is to say, the Vitruvian revival. The word may be said to be used in that sense in Professor Ruskin's works, especially the third volume of the ' Stones of Venice.' To the opinion of it there expressed, he and his followers, including myself, have always adhered, and still adhere ; and I shall not go on about an architecture of entirely derivative nature and merits. In as far as the Vitruvian system deigns to use the round arch and the cupola vault, its best constructive features, they are derived from Rome ; and the study of Roman architecture is
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open. Its beauties of proportion and decoration come from Greece ; and it is better for English students to go to the British Museum, and look at the Elgin marbles, than to try to get up decoration from the works of gentlemen who consider acanthus scrolls and grotesque arabesques the especial and most conspicuous charac- teristics of Greek and Roman decorative art. In the definition we began with, sculpture is ignored : as if the Olympian Jupiter had been considered a necessary dis- figurement to Elis, and the frieze of hate-filled Amazons, and heroic youths, and the knights of Athens rolling in their saddles (or without them), on those little horses every one of whom would have carried Attica, were, on the whole, not decorative, or the reverse of orna- mental.
Then the next limitation of the Renaissance is that adopted by M. Taine, among many others ; though he limits his favourite period to the last twenty-five years of the fifteenth century, and the first forty years of the cinque cento, or sixteenth. It is the common idea, I presume ; and the fact is, I should call it a period of maturity, not of fresh birth or revival, as the latter years of the sixteenth century are a time of decadence, and not of renascence. Of course, if the period of Michael Angelo and Rafael be a living period, that of Ghirlandajo and Perugino cannot be a dead one ; and as Ghirlandajo certainly studied Masaccio, as everybody has done ever since, that takes the Revival back to his death, in 1429. Then one cannot say that art' was dead, and wanted fresh life in the period of Angelico, who was born in 1387, nor in Orcagna's, nor Giotto's, nor that of the Pisani. In short, the renaissance of art had best be taken as beginning at Pisa, and with Niccola, worker in that city under certain Byzantine Greeks. Art revived
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in them, and grew to maturity in their successors for three hundred years.
This putting back of the beginning of the great European movement called renaissance, agrees with the view taken by Mr. Bryce in his essay on the German Empire, and with that of the charming studies of Mr. Pater : it has just been announced again by Mr. Ruskin in his last course of lectures. These works are popular works ; that is to say, they are very easy and pleasant to read ; but all alike are formed on the strictest and hardest work, and on examination of nearly all accessible docu- ments, written or painted. It is not the same thing to say a man is a popular writer as to say he is a false or superficial writer ; and this confusion seems to me pur- posely made in many cases by the duller part of the intellectual school. These views, however, are confirmed by the authority of Drs. Liibke and Woltmann, Ger- man art historians, to whom we are all deeply indebted. We must never forget, of course, that the Revival is the revival of all the activities of the many-sided mind ; that it is literary, legal, musical, poetic, artistic, all together : all these writers are careful to point this out. And I say, that the true period of renascence is marked by the meeting of the classical and the mediaeval mind. For art, that meeting or combination is marked by Niccola Pisano's beginning to study the great Chase of Mel- eager, a bas-relief brought from Greece in Pisan galleys, and placed in the Campo Santo. 'It is not possible now,' says Mr. Bryce, 'to enter into the feeling with which the relics of antiquity were regarded by those who saw in them their only mental possession.' He speaks for the renaissance of literature, but refers to art directly after : ' With us, the old has been overlaid by the new till its origin is forgotten : to them, ancient
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books were the only standard of taste, the only vehicle of truth, the only stimulus to reflection.' He insists greatly on the vast importance, to the Gothic mind, of collision with the Greek or Roman, especially with the former. ' It is to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that we are accustomed to assign the new birth of the human spirit with which the modern time begins. The date is well chosen ; for it was then first that the tran- scendent influence of Greece began to work upon the world in literature (in art, it had begun two centuries before). It had certainly begun before at Florence, in art,' says Mr. Bryce ; * and even in learning, and zeal for learning, what may be called the Roman Renaissance begun with the passionate study of the Institutes of Justinian.' Mr. Pater, too, takes his earliest study from the passionate writing of 'Aucassin and Nicolette,' also a work of the later twelfth century, as I under- stand him. Provence studied that ; the graver Flo- rentines took up the Institutes. Then Mr. Bryce puts the rise of the scholastic philosophy in the thirteenth century as its revival-period ; and I have already said that art distinctly revives then by the Gothic Niccola's study of Greek. ' In the fourteenth century arose in Italy the great masters of painting and of song ; ' or they began to arise.
Let us adopt this, and repeat it once more : there is a Roman renaissance in the twelfth century with the study of law, a philosophical or metaphysical renaissance in the thirteenth, soon to be set aside for Platonism in Italy ; then thought breaks out into colour and song in the next age ; and the fifteenth century shows art matured, and the revival of Greek prepared.
There is no doubt that the Lombard or Etrurian ancestors of the Pisans and Florentines had done much
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bas-relief of great merit before Niccola. It was merito- rious ; and he found life in it : but, when he saw the Greek work, he saw beauty also, face to face, and joined the Greek interpretation of Nature to the Gothic. I may mention in passing, what most of us are aware of, that the church of S. Zenone in Verona is the noblest and most complete example of this Lombard Roman- esque work ; that is to say, of the sculpture of the noblest race of Northern Barbarians, instructed in the relics of Italo-Byzantine art and skill. Let us have no mistake about the difference between old Greek models and new Greek. Old Greek means Attic ; new Greek means Byzantine; and Niccola began the renaissance of art when he left his Byzantine masters to study the older work. Till his day, the most artistic races in Italy were only instructed in fragments, and faint, faded traces of Latinized-Greek art. Old Rome had learnt from Old Greece (Attica) all she ever knew of art, except her great constructive gifts of the round arch, cupola, and wagon vault. Till the thirteenth century, the Lom- bards, who began by the eighth century to be the chief students among Northern races, were taught through old Rome in her ashes, and by new Greece or Byzan- tium as centre of the Christian empire and the Church, which preserved the sad relics of the graphic sciences. They were a Scandinavian, wood-carving, and iron- welding race, hammermen all ; and as soon as they saw bas-relief carvings, and got access to the marbles of the Italian Alps, they went to work with hammer and chisel as naturally as with hammer and anvil of old.
Renaissance, then, means the spring of the Gothic mind into delighted life on getting fresh lessons from the Greek. I say, Gothic and Greek ; if you like, let us say, classical and mediaeval : and this holds good in
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literature and art alike. But let us just notice Professor Liibke's division of the renaissance of architecture, which I think both illustrates and confirms what has been already said. This is from his history of Renaissance architecture. The former word, as we saw at first, has a peculiar meaning in architecture ; that is to say, the revival of Italian-Greek, or classical building, as against Gothic. Yet here, also, it is a movement through Roman work, back to Greece ; through the round arch and vault, back to the lintel. In Early-Renais- sance architecture, too, the effort is back to Greek work : the difference is, that the older Pisan Goth, so called, sympathized with the Greek in working from Nature ; the Cinque-Cento man worked as a copyist from Rome or Greece, not seeking Nature. Dr. Liibke's division is into Early Renaissance, High Renaissance, and Baroque Renaissance. And this is not different from Mr. Ruskin's division of the classicized architecture of Venice, into Byzantine or Gothic Renaissance, Roman, and Grotesque. The third, and great part of the second, of these periods appear to him, and to me, to be decadent instead of renascent. It seems as if the High Renaissance failed where old Roman architects failed, — in trying to combine Greek ornament of com- paratively low lintel or flat architecture (and not the best part of it) with their own round - arched con- struction.
The Roman round arch re-appears in Gothic work, you know, in the matchless piazza of Orcagna in Flo- rence, before 1376. But it is agreed on all hands that Brunelleschi, the builder of the great Duomo Sta. Maria dei Fiore of Florence, is the great typical master of the first classical renascence in architecture (1 377-1444). Study of old Roman work, with its gigantic power of
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scale and great constructive merits, taught him to com- bine the grand proportions and perfect finish of classical workmanship with the inventiveness and rich passion of the Gothic. And he, moreover, with the earlier and mightier architects of the Renaissance, had the sense to abide by the round arch. I repeat, that the modern classicism failed where the earlier Roman architecture failed, — in trying to adapt the Greek ornament of the low lintel to their own round-vaulted constructions. Had Rome clung faithfully to her arch, her buildings would have had far greater beauty ; such as is possessed by the Casa Grimani (by Sanmicheli) and the works of Sansovino in Venice. At all events, the modern, or rococo grotesque, or irregular derivative styles, would have had something in them beside proportions and five orders ; and our streets would have been some- thing more than tiers of boxes with square holes. The Reform Club in Pall Mall is copied from the Farnese Palace : that is the model of our modern street archi- tecture, regardless of expense. Harley Street is the economical type. Somehow, the classical renascence of architecture has brought us to that, and even now we are by no means sure whether we care to change it or not.
Though I think it is far better for me to speak of the renascence in its graphic or artistic aspects than in others, it is impossible to separate the progress of the fine arts, in Italy or anywhere else, from the progress of the other activities of the human mind. And this is shown us with absolute conclusiveness as soon as we cross the Alps, and observe the development of the German mind. With England and Germany, the Re- naissance means, first, the Reformation, then the Baconian method of experimental induction, and the
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study of Nature to the uttermost ; the modern spirit, as Professor Matthew Arnold calls it. One great name dominates all Northern art here : I mean Holbein's. Diirer is the last of Mediaeval Germans, and most German of great painters. Holbein is the greatest of German painters, perhaps of German men ; and he and the Reformation, in which he took most serious and effective part, force upon us certain questions on what is called the religious or anti-religious character of the Renaissance. We are forced to understand that the new birth of knowledge synchronizes with the deca- dence of a form or system of the Faith. When know- ledge has to contend, not with religious persecution, but irreligious, and that from the hands of the titular chiefs of the Christian religion ; when Leo X or Alex- ander VI can declare, as pope, that he is the Faith, as Louis XIV said he was the State, — then the pursuit of truth will be non-religious, and, probably, become irre- ligious. The death of Savonarola in 1497, by command of Alexander VI, seems to me to mark one of the most distressing turning-points in the history of Italy and the world.
At that date, Italy, divided against herself, and bereft of counsel, decided that reform in religion could not and should not be. In 1492, Rafael and M. Angelo are young, Lionardo in his prime, Lorenzo the Magnifi- cent is dying, the Borgia is pope, the renascence is at its culminating point. Well, five years after this, the man most powerful to restore and renew the faith is slain by the titular head of the faith, who avowedly believes nothing. Italy gives up hope of divine rule on earth or anywhere. Then, and soon, the natural con- sequence is convulsive and reckless energy in all the brilliant pursuits of the Renaissance. Christian, Neo-
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Platonist, and Neo-Pagan try altogether to make what they can of this world, since the other is closed to them. They go back to the time when art and song were religion in Greece, when the theatre was the temple of Dionysus, and the Parthenon contained the beauty of the world. Pope or no pope, the sense of right, valour, truth, temperance, was yet left to all who would have it. Some cast all off, like Cellini or Giulio Romano : others tried to hold by morals according to rules of heathen philosophy, falling back, as heathen, on what God had taught heathen from of old.
Yet even now, the greatest men held by the faith, and were all Christian men; but they were against the cen- tral religious system. Dante, Savonarola, Michael Angelo, Holbein, were all members and movers of this move- ment ; but it would be profoundly unhistorical to try to give account of any of them without his Christianity. And to an artist historian, or, rather, a student of art and history, the Renaissance divides best at the Re- formation ; for that is the time when art lost her true and ancient alliance and service, and was set against religion in the minds of all earnest artists. In the early renascence it was considered that a man's religion — what he thought of the spiritual world, and his own share in it — was the chief, best, and highest subject for his mind to be employed on, whenever he could so employ it. Under that mediaeval, and, perhaps, not entirely obsolete view of things, painters of high and passionate spirit, in the intervals of fierce life and sin, possibly cared most to work on the subjects of the spiritual life; rejoiced in imaginations of them with great joy; did in some sort, 'within their heads,' and with the inner eyes of the soul, see ' angels whitening through the dim, that they might paint them.' And
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when such men, like the Pisani, like Ghirlandajo, like Botticelli, trained in all the inherited science of the Lorn bard race since Alboin, came in their strength to see what Greeks had done before them, adding the Hellenic love of beautiful humanity to their own delight in free fields and green leaves, they became the world's wonders, while their works last. And Michael Angelo is great among these, in spite of his gloom and jealousy, and the science which spoiled his life. At all events, he was born into the faith ; he held it ; he desired its reform and renewal ; he died in it, confessing it with his last sonnet and last breath, seeming to find rest, at last, in turning his face to the wall, away from the arts he had followed so passionately. I could not name him or any other man as chief in the Renaissance : Pisani, Giotto, Botti- celli, Rafael, Titian, and Tintoret, mightier than any, are only the centre of a great cycle of greatness. But I really wonder that there is such a conventional admiration of Michael Angelo. It seems to be, in fact, surgical, and not artistic. I should say that the highest quality of his work was the least likely to be attractive in our own day; for it is Awe. That is a spiritual influence, if there be any spirit. I am justified in saying that what we call awe is closely allied to the religious sentiment ; that it is the chief effect of certain great works of his ; and that these works — the Duke Lorenzo, Day and Night, and even the Moses — consti- tute Michael Angelo's chief title to be held so great in art, They give the world assurance of a man with a soul ; and materialism, probably, will scorn them for ever accordingly, or go on for ever praising their thews and sinews, and wrinkles and calves.
It is a very loose employment of our native tongue to talk about the Renaissance as irreligious. Personi-
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fication is a good enough trick of rhetoric ; but it often gives people absurdly confused ideas. Really, there never was a beautiful, very learned, rather ill-conducted, sceptical live lady of the name of Renaissance, who never went to church or said her prayers, but taught everybody the religious principles of Leo X. We mean by this word, as we use it, not only the revival of art and literature, but all the men and women in and for whom they were revived. Now, these were not all, or a majority of them, unbelieving or even non-religious persons. Of course, their technical skill was technical, and their science was scientific. A great deal of every artist's life, and every other man's, has to do with things and facts which are secular, and not religious. If you want to learn art, you must study technical and natural facts ; if you want to be a good critic, you must study history, literature, and technics ; and they are not found in the Bible. Yet you cannot separate religion from the two former, and, if you be a Christian man, these studies will assuredly tell you of Christ.
But what account can be given of Sandro Botticelli, without mention of his picture of the Nativity, and his being a Piagnone, or follower of Savonarola ? Would he have painted that picture, or done it so well, if he had been one of the Compagnacci, or Evil Companions, or Mohocks of Florence? Buonarotti, Bellini, Holbein, Diirer, Bacon, Milton, — if religion be nothing, it was nothing to them ; if it be false, it was an element of falsehood in them : and on those suppositions only can you leave their faith out of account when you think about them. So, if you are to have an account of the Renaissance without Holbein, and an account of Hol- bein without the Reformation, why, both your accounts will be eminently imperfect.
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On this matter, I think it should be observed, that the function of a critic differs greatly from that of an artist. I think, certainly, that a man who writes a book to weaken the hold which others have on their creed, or lessen the restraint which the laws of chastity exercise over other men, is guilty of sin, and does a bad deed : he need not have chosen such a subject or manner. But, supposing his work, to have qualities which cannot be passed over, you cannot blame his critics for giving account of him. They can but say what they find in him : the only question for them is, Shall they examine him at all ? £ Aucassin and Nicolette ' is a Provencal tale of the twelfth century, and if it be really of that date, of which Mr. Pater appears convinced, there is nothing to say against him for writing a charming essay upon it. The little hero's quaint outburst about not wanting to go to heaven is a curious repetition or parallel of a story in Gibbon, which Kingsley makes use of in describing old Wulfs refusal of baptism, in ' Hypatia.' Aucassin declares that he would much rather go to hell, because all the nice persons and things he knows — warriors, clerks, maidens, gold, jewels, 1 vair et gris ' — go there, and Nicolette will go with him too. Gibbon's tale is somewhat less silly, at all events. Let Canon Kingsley tell the story of Wulf the Lombard- Goth : ' The old warrior was stepping into the font, when he turned suddenly to the bishop, and asked where were the souls of his heathen ancestors. ' In hell,' answered the worthy prelate. Wulf drew back from the font, and threw his bear-skin cloak around him : he preferred, he said, if Adolph had no objection, to go to his own people.' No doubt, as Mr. Pater says, sentiment in Provence appealed to but a small circle of cognoscenti ; and their ideas were Antinomian. Scott tells us, in
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( Anne of Geierstein,' that the Provencal tone of morality was lax. I suspect that good knights and true ladies called this by worse names than Antinomianism at the time, in less privileged lands. The lay of Thiebault, the troubadour, about the lady who ate her paramour, or some portion of him, thoroughly scandalizes Arthur, the young English knight, in 'Anne of Geierstein.' Corruption is corruption in all ages : it is not peculiar to the Renaissance or to Pro- vence ; but this Antinomian literature belongs to the decadence of mediaeval life, rather than to the revival of accurate scholarship, and skilful painting from Nature. At all times, passionate and unhappy people have been Antinomian, let us call it. That the south of France has had so much of this quality may account for the insignificance of the south of France in French history. But the Romaunt of ' Aucassin and Nicolette ' is harm- less, as far as its immorality goes, because no im- morality is really intended by the author or authors.
And we do not find, either, when we consider the scientific part of the renascence, that it was specially irreligious, or an element of irreligion. It was a new method of inquiry into truth ; and, in so far as the faith is true, the results of the new inquiries could not but agree with it. This the inquirers of that day felt, and, for the most part, submitted to and accepted it, though this age is apt to think that they ought to have rushed at the conclusions of the French Encyclopedic Men in that day could be real inquirers, and suspend negative conclusions, instead of anticipating them. Like St. Thomas, not knowing how to believe, they still re- mained with the brethren. And I really think Mr. Pater is simply right, when he says that it is the part of the aesthetic critic, and of all of us, I suppose, when we
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admire a thing, to consider this alone concerning it, — what pleasure, of what kind and derivation, we are get- ting from it. He who is honest and keen with himself on this matter, if he make a bad choice, will, at least, have to own it to himself, and be led to examine what there is in himself which makes this or that, which others are perhaps ashamed of, pleasant to him. Mr. Pater does not mean that mere immediate gratification is the end of art or of life, but that the critic must speak with clearness and sincerity from his own interior, and distinguish what the true charm, to him, of this or that beautiful sight, sound, or thought, may be. The word £ pleasure ' has too often unpleasant associations ; and I hardly think it can apply to the emotions caused by the Duke Lorenzo (Michael Angelo's greatest work) in the mind of a spectator competent to admire it. But I think Mr. Pater means, that every critic must be accu- rate and faithful in his analysis of what it is in a work of art which pleases him. If we all were so, there would be fewer to look at immoral work : they would have to own to themselves why they liked it ; and there would be less self-delusion, and fewer vain attempts to cheat the Devil.
In any case, the Reformation is a part of the Renais- sance ; and, in any case, the Reformation was a religious movement ; and Holbein's art was one of its motive- powers. You have heard of his great polemical wood- cuts of ' The Indulgence-Mongers,' and ' Christ the True Light.' The latter is the German protest against the Aristotelian philosophy which governed the doctors, who governed the pope, who governed the world. Schoolmen have taken the place of Scripture, and Ger- many calls for the written word. The Pardon-shop is the practical protest that there is personal repentance
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of the man towards God, and that that is of avail. It is more necessary than ever, in these days, to be careful of the word ' Protestantism.' There is the Protestant- ism of personal religion, and of personal irreligion ; of faith in Christ, and denial of Christ and of God. The former is the older meaning of the word, and the only one which I can recognize ; and in this woodcut Hol- bein preached it to all Germany and all mankind. The cardinals and friars are selling God's forgiveness of sins to those who can pay for it. and denying it to those who cannot. The sting of the picture is not, that the rich sinner is fined, or that the monk gets the money, but that the beggar entreats the priesthood to consider his bodily misery, and let God have mercy on his soul, and can get no mercy because he has no money. Holbein and Luther, if the hand of the former did not fail him in Luther's portrait, were physically like each other : both seem to have been men who would be glad enough of a rich man's admission into heaven ; but that a poor man should be shut out for not being rich was a notion they could not bear.
Let us have a slight sketch of Holbein's life, as repre- sentative artist of the Northern Renaissance. It extends from 1495 or 1498 to 1543, when he died in London, of the plague. He is a portrait-painter, the son of a portrait-painter, digressing into metal-work ; not trained as a goldsmith, like Verrochio, or Diirer, or Lionardo, or Ghirlandajo. He learns character and expression from knights and ladies and burghers of Augsburg and of Ulm. He went to England first in 1527, — the year before Diirer died ; and Florence made her last effort for liberty, with Michael Angelo for her chief engineer. Garret and Clarke, and the poor ' Christian brothers ' from Cambridge, were in great danger of their lives
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about that time in Oxford. This is what Holbein had done up to this time, — portraits innumerable, notably that of Erasmus ; the Praise of Folly, and the great polemical woodcuts ; he had illustrated a Bible mar- vellously, and done grand Old Testament wall-paintings at Basel : had painted or restored the Dance of Death (or one of them) on the cathedral cloister at Basel ; and had issued his woodcut version of it, whereof more. In 1529 he returns to Basel to find bitter fruit of the Re- formation. That was the great and grievous year of German Iconoclasm ; when all the churches were strip- ped, not only of idolatry, but of beauty and the precious records of seven hundred years. He saw what he saw, and returned to England in 1532, only to leave it before his death for a short visit to Brussels and the Low Countries. James V died of Solway Moss in 1542 ; and Holbein died of the plague in London next year. He is the great realist of the renascence, the first master of Northern Cinque-Cento ; his is the greatest Northern realist imagination in sacred history and allegory : he is master of grotesque, and prince of portraiture : the world has few greater names. And as the Dance of Death in woodcut is the work by which he is most generally known, and which, perhaps, contains most of his soul, we will speak of it now.
Most of us have read the third volume of the ' Stones of Venice,' and from that formed an idea of the way in which Renaissance sculptors treated the subject of death. There had been in Venice a system of sepul- chral ornament, expressive of Christian hope in the simplest way. Its arrangement was this in the fifteenth century, — a sarcophagus with canopy above ; on the canopy a small figure of the knight as he rode in arms, under it a full-sized statue of him as he lay dead. He
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is dead ; but he had valour and worth, and they and he are Christ's : that is all the sculptor says. This treat- ment is derived straight from the Catacombs, where the larger tombs are formed by the hollowed-out arcosolium, or half apse above the sarcophagus, or flat-topped tomb, on which celebration of Holy Communion may take place, if the tenant be a martyr. This had given place, by this time, to heaven knows what pompous paganisms in Venice, described in the volume above-mentioned. They expressed no Christian hope, and symbolized no Christian doctrine ; they betrayed a threefold vanity of state, money, and science ; they and their degenerate imitations in this country are the very petrifaction of undertaking. The overpowering fun of Charles Dickens prevents our understanding his intense irony. Do you remember Mr. Mould descanting on what wealth can really do to console a man in the presence of death? ' It can give him the plumage of the ostrich ; it can give him any number of mutes carrying batons tipped with brass,' &c. This marks the decadence of art and religion together : the costly tomb, cut with contemp- tible skill, takes the place of all other consolation in death. It really is just like Mr. Bumble's notion of the gentleman in the white waistcoat, who went to heaven in an oak coffin with plated handles. The principle is just the same : he is well who is well buried.
Against all this, the rough German breaks in with his first moral of the great equality of death. O just, mighty, subtle, and searching one! welcome to the weary, the brave, and the faithful, to all who will fear God, and consider the end. It is this contented, open- eyed acceptance of the well-understood terrors and victory of the last enemy that is the brighter side of the Dance of Death. Holbein's mind is that of the North,
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both grave and reckless, excited by the sight of so great a thing as death. For the just, there is salvation ; but there is a great shock to bear, and a dark way to go first. They know what is beyond ; but they know it as in a glass, darkly, by symbol and figure, and they do not know what it is like. They are represented in the great frontispiece of the Judgment, rejoicing before God, and they only. ' If you must fear,' quoth the painter, ' fear not too much : this cup passes not from us without drinking. Death has his day and his victory, then cometh the end.' But then, again, he turns on the luxurious and careless, and yet more fiercely on the false and cruel : ' The Lord hath seen that your day is coming. Are you beautiful?' says the Spectre, who is no respecter ; ' woe to you if you care for nothing but your beauty : lean arms shall clasp it like a bride's. Are you eloquent ? look you be faithful and true in words ; for I am with you, Death, the unquestionable, the sincerest thing on earth ; come with me, and beware of the lie in your right hand. Are you kingly or noble ? Such as you do cruel oppression from London to By- zantium, and elsewhere ; come with me, and reap as you have sown. Are you rich ? Come straightway, and we will see how you got your money, and what you have done with it.' The call of death is harsh and heavy to all ; but since he comes to all equally, and One has overcome him for us, anyhow, it is madness to forget him. Holbein's mood is not that of democratic envy. The poor are as frightened as the rich ; the little child is led away weeping ; and the women stay behind refusing to be comforted ; the poor peddler has the greatest objection to be parted from his heavy pack ; the fool makes foolish resistance to the assailant who violates his privileges, just as the old noble, the edel Degen, or good
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sword of many combats, does fierce battle once more, not for life, but because it is his way. ' Each dies in his vocation ; but for all this,' saith Holbein, ' there re- maineth a rest for the people of God.' And he rightly refuses to set forth anything else in the Last Day, except their joy. This is the difference between dif- ferent men's views of death in the Renaissance. One view is not religious, the other is roughly so ; one has produced the later Renaissance tombs, which seem to me monstrous ; the other, the Dance of Death, which seems to me grand. But if we are asked according to (what I hold to be) the wrong interpretation of Mr. Pater's canon of criticism ; or if we are to ask ourselves what kind of pleasure we get from the Dance of Death, from the pictures of the Passion, from Michael Angelo's Thought of the Duke Lorenzo (or rather, Giuliano), — I think we must say, we do not and ought not to get any. The school called the Noble Grotesque requires some other word than pleasure to express the emotions obtained from its great works.
Let us recapitulate a little. The revival of art began when men began to study, not Nature only, nor Greek models only, but Nature as Greeks had studied her before. Then along with art revived the study of law, twelfth century, the school-philosophy of the thirteenth, the poetry of the fourteenth ; and the fifteenth and part of the sixteenth see their maturity and great glory. With all this revival comes that of Greek literature, which is the motive-power of the Reformation ; and in the sixteenth century we have physical science, properly so called, and the modern processes of inquiry into natural facts. There is a new spirit of fresh seeking, new thought, new appeal to Nature. It is religion in men who hold the faith earnestly ; in others, it is simply
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desire of fresh knowledge. In many painters, it is thirst for beauty only ; and art, strangely, first debauches, then withers in their hands. In men of science, it is simply determination to turn the light of their reason faithfully on their study, and prove all things. Men rose up and said, We, and a number of things in which we will have truth, if God will, are not rightly explained by the Aristotelian categories. We will have new arrangements for new phenomena. Let us look at facts, — at the facts of antiquity and present nature, at the Greek language, and its literature and art, and at what God has given us to know on earth of earth. In an evil hour, theology was set, for base worldly reasons, against all this ; and the quarrel has never been healed. But men are begin- ning to see that theology and science, as things of the many-sided mind, have their mutual limits; and their dispute is fast settling, I trust, into a general boundary question, so far adjusted, by this time, that rival pro- fessors will admit that physical experiment and spiritual experience are, after all, both real things ; and, when that is granted, firm ground is reached.
For ourselves, the Greeks studied Nature faithfully : so let us do what they did, not only copying them, but imitating them. The real hope of English art now is the pure love of nature, observation, and imitation. Labour on that, and imaginative power will follow or be given you, and the spirit of wisdom and invention will be new born in you. We have models enough, and systematic teaching enough ; we have learnt enough about learning ; we have copies of pictures, and books about books : but nothing will help art, and the people through art, so much now as honest drawing of landscape and portrait. Let everybody try, with such teaching as he can get, to draw the scene or the person he loves best.
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That is art, however simple, the symbolic expression of our delight in some work of God which He has given us to be delighted with.
We have distinguished, and partly classified, the periods of the Renaissance. For its great artists, it will be found better, in order to have a connected memory of how they come, to take them in groups, ticketing each group with the name of its greatest men. Thus you have the cathedral of Pisa, built by Buschetto, with Byzantine decorations in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Niccola begins the Greek Renaissance in the thirteenth. You begin the fourteenth with the Arnolfo- Dante-Giotto-Orcagna group ; and Van Eyck, the ultra- montane. Brunelleschi, Angelico, Masaccio, begin the fifteenth. Botticelli's life is contained in it ; and it ends with Angelo, Rafael, Columbus, Diirer, Holbein, and Bellini in Venice. Then art migrates to the Lagunes. Remember Tintoret was Titian's pupil, and was born the year before Flodden 15 12, and Veronese died in the Armada year 1588. In the Flodden year, moreover, Diirer published the Knight and Death ; and Rafael finished the Camera della Segnatura in the Vatican. Two years before (1510) he, Michael Angelo, and Luther had been in Rome together. Velasquez was born eleven years later; and Hogarth a hundred and two years after that. Blake may have seen Hogarth, Turner must have seen Blake. Reynolds was thirty years younger than Hogarth. It is a rough kind of chart, but may be useful.
For the architectural periods of the Renaissance, we took up with Dr. Liibkes division, — Early Renaissance, High Renaissance, and Baroque Renaissance ; take with these the names of Brunelleschi and Bramante ; and, for the third, whoever you please. Agostino Busti is named
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in the architectural article which we began with. With these periods we compared those of Venetian architec- ture as given by Prof. Ruskin, — Byzantine Renaissance, Roman, and Grotesque. They answer exactly to each other, only that in Venice, men so able as Sanmicheli and Sansovino rightly adhered to the round arch, and their work retains much grandeur and beauty.
Then we said the Renaissance was not to be called a religious or irreligious movement, because movements are not religious or irreligious things. Men are ; and all through the ages, from Nicolas of Pisa to Ruskin of Oxford, their contest between faith, doubt, and denial, has gone on — with what fortune who knoweth save God only ? This much seemed certain, that in Italy, at the time of the Reformation, which marks the High Renais- sance period, the representatives of the Christian faith seemed to need great reformation ; and, as they were able to tread it out on their side the Alps, the pursuit of knowledge and art took a less religious form there.
North of the Alps, the Renaissance means the Reforma- tion ; that is to say, a distressing struggle on matters of faith. For the scientific or modern method of inquiry into truth it is religious or irreligious exactly according to the character of every individual person who pursues it. We chose Holbein as our representative artist for the Reforma- tion period, as its greatest workman, an adopted English- man, and the author of the Dance of Death, which has an archaeological connection, through Orcagna's Triumph of Death in the Campo Santo at Pisa, with the mosaic work of the early, almost the Primitive Church. But this is a matter which requires a whole course of lectures to itself.
Yet it is a part of the history of the art renaissance to consider how we ourselves, in our disputes between
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Gothicism and classicalism, have lost sight of the real continuity of art history. One man is given to the pro- motion of German or French Gothic architecture : he cannot bear to think of the instructions or the traditions of art, as they were first communicated, by Byzantium or by Italy, to the ancestors of West Franks and East Franks alike. Another is devoted to modern utilities, — porticos, pediments, proportions, and square windows: he wants Capitols and Parthenons to look at, and Gower Street and Baker Street to live in. Both alike lose sight of the fact that Greece studied Nature in men and animals, and, ornamenting her architecture from that source of beauty, made it the world's example to this day ; and that the great merit of Roman architecture has been to observe and preserve Greek beauty with her own constructive power. Both forget that all that was right or beautiful in either comes from the delighted study of God's work, which we call Nature.
Again : the continuity of art history is lost sight of on the Christian side. We keep contending for Gothic architecture as ecclesiastical, and forget that it is also domestic, and that, in mediaeval times, people lived in mediaeval houses. We forget, also, that, in primitive Christian days of the Roman empire, people lived in Roman houses with Graeco-Roman ornament. There was no Gothic in the early Church, and no Byzantine even for at least four hundred years of the Church. The earliest works of Christian art, alike in painting and in sculpture, are simply Graeco-Roman. The martyrs and confessors of the first days seem gladly to have accepted the aid of heathen workmen in the decoration of their tombs and retired places of worship, and to have been willing enough to have ordinary subjects for orna- ment upon their walls, if they could only refer to them
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in their own minds as Christian symbols with Christian meaning. Hence the constant use of the vine. It was, of course, a common subject for Gentile decoration ; and it attracted no special notice from the Gentile : to the Christian it was the Vine of souls, the Lord's chosen emblem of Himself. Scenes of pastoral life delighted the middle-class Romans : the Christians would have such scenes, also, painted in their catacombs, if one figure bearing the sheep that is lost, the Shepherd of souls, would stand for them at the centres of their vault- ings, expressing silently the Lord's other parable of Himself. They used the myths of Hesione and Andro- meda, substituting Jonah. Noah took the place of Deucalion on some of their walls. They seem, indeed, to have desired to Christianize such myths as these, and especially that of Orpheus, partly for the sake of in- dulging hope concerning their Gentile ancestors. If these tales were foreshadowings of the kingdom of God, then these our fathers may not have been far from- the kingdom. Then for the original and scriptural subjects of Christian ornament, which ought to have been faith- fully and jealously handed down to us from the second century, tradition and legend have obscured them, and the Renaissance has thrown utter oblivion over them. The subjects of church-decoration, symbolic or historical, were once both strictly and amply defined. Scriptural emblem and scriptural history were thought to give wide enough range for the painter or sculptor : all his mind and skill were to be given to show how the law and the prophets alike testified to the fulfilled and com- pleted faith. The earliest cycle of ornament, in the Catacombs, is called the Ciclo Biblico by the Com- mendatore De Rossi, our leading Italian authority. It is not too much to say that there is a tradition of
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Christian teaching by painting and sculpture, illustrative of Holy Scripture, which begins with the catacomb frescoes and sarcophagi, and is carried on in the great mosaics of Rome, and more particularly those of Ra- venna. It consists in scriptural records of the Old and New Testament, of prophecies of our Lord and their fulfilment : it continues, in one shape or another, till Holbein ; and with him it ends. It all but perished in the ninth century, except for the MSS. which still con- tinued to be produced (or perhaps only preserved) in the scriptoria of such monasteries as escaped destruction by Goth or Lombard, and in the new Rome. But, before this, the iconoclasm of the eighth century drove the artists of Byzantium, with many of their most precious works and relics, by sheer unreasoning, undistinguishing persecution, westwards and northwards. The embers of art, in short, were cherished in the monasteries till the great Teutonic migration had fairly settled in the re- distributed provinces of the empire. They were pre- served ; but they were mingled with legend ; and their centre is not the Lord's life on earth so much as His passion and death. Yet the picture-teaching of scrip- tural history was continued in Florence and Venice, and in many French and German temples, till at last, with the Reformation, the Arts were made to break with the Faith. The senseless splendour of the decadent renais- sance took the place of the passion and thought of the Italian-Gothic revival ; and Puritanism cast out form, colour, and imagination from all sincere religion in the north of Europe.
What the new mediaeval renaissance of our own day may bring forth, we know not : it seems, at present, more zealous of the minor matters of the laws of deco- rative beauty than of the greater, more anxious about
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robes than frescoes, and addicted to ceremonial rather than sculpture. It seems, too, to have provoked an architectural reaction, of which the new public buildings opposite Whitehall are a really grand result. But for Church work, until history be followed back to the original examples and documents of the primitive faith, it seems to stand to reason that nothing like primitive decoration can ever be had ; still its subjects are ascer- tainable and ascertained ; and perhaps the truest renais- sance of all, for us, will be the return of English painters to sacred work in sacred places, on the subjects of primitive days.
The great work of Mr. Holman Hunt is now open to the public, uniting in itself the two ideals of the form of our Lord, which have been preserved in the Christian mind from the third century. He is spoken of as the fairest of all men, also as possessing no form or comeliness in the ascetic sense ; and the painters great skill and singular happiness in the selection of his model have enabled him, in a great degree, to combine the ascetic and the beautiful ideal. The renascence of the highest and most spiritual, as well as the most powerful forms of art, is not to be despaired of in the nation, or at the time, which has produced such a picture as this.
CHAPTER VI.
IT was a warm late October morning at Hawkstone : the tergiversations of an English autumn were going on as usual ; and a southerly wind and a cloudy- sky had succeeded a few days' slight frost. Leaves were snowing down in the park ; and the pale green turf was beginning to be varied with yellow and red where they had drifted ; while russet and gold gained on the autumn green above.
Let us ' do this gentleman's seat on our way,' as Moore says. Hawkstone Holt near Bristlebury, then, was a fair type of the midland or northern house and park, of the second or third order of size. The Latter- math family had enjoyed one great privilege from father to son in successive generations, — they never overbuilt themselves. The old house was not very old ; and the family conviction always was, that it was big enough, and, moreover, that it was good taste to keep one's house within one's rents, rather than beyond them. It is surprising, if one happens to know any thing of a county, to think what havoc is wrought by architects and builders in the ranks of the Squirearchy. The bills are not the worst, though they are what they are : the really fatal thing is the infallible certainty,
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that, when you have built a habitation a little above your fortune, you will proceed to live in it a great deal beyond your income. But we are concerned with some small part of what the knight and lady of Hawk- stone did, not with any thing they didn't do.
This morning, like other people, they came down to breakfast. The ways of the house were punctual ; but breakfast was kept for late-comers up to any date, and you could have it in your room, if you liked ; but nobody ever did. Even foreign visitors liked to come down by nine, and join in the endless chatter and goings-on of that big breakfast -table. There were prayers early, in the hall, which was on the Yorkshire principle, — large, low, and in the middle of the house. It was divided from the front-door by a great porch, — a hall in itself, — dedicated to sticks, great -coats, umbrellas, and all odoriferous water-proofs, with some lemon verbenas and cape-jessamines to maintain a balance of scents. This was mostly plate-glass : within the hall all was black oak, portraits, furs, antlers, Persian rugs, armour, curiosities, two or three pet breech-loaders in a glass case, books, newspapers, and infinite stationery. Flora did most of her vast letter-writing here. She said it was no use shutting herself up with a dictionary, or retiring at all : people were so sure to come after her, that she preferred being ready for people. Nothing ever seemed to interrupt her. She was young, and keen on her leading idea always, so as to be able to ' throw her tongue' whenever she liked, without losing it, — such was the expression of her admiring husband. At all events, Lady Lattermath could and did talk and write with considerable piquancy on two subjects at once, or in the rapidest succession.
Well, her rooms were on one side of the hall, as we
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said, — on the west side of the house ; and she had a conservatory, which worked round the corner to the drawing-room on the south, and so on to the dining- room. Jack had a large study, dressing-room, and bed- room on the other side of the front-door, — of course I don't mean the outside — and his private department ended in a sort of gun-room, studio, workshop, and smoking-room, with a lathe, a small forge, and a large adjacent billiard-room. He hated all games on the cards, and never would have any thing at Hawkstone except whist, at decent hours, if he could help it ; and this he was generally quite able to do. When they danced, it was in the hall or the large library; where there was an oak floor, and every thing ran on noiseless castors. All the rooms were large, and rather low : drawing-room white, pale turquoise, and paler crimson, with much dead gold to relieve the old oak; Eastern water-colours; a John Lewis and a Holman Hunt, the pride of that realist household ; Cairene sketches by Charley, and some by Walton in the Sinai Desert ; one or two snow-scenes, for contrast ; altogether the room had interest and breadth of effect. Flora avoided bric-a-brac, and liked pictures, even beyond decorative unity. One of the ideas she had gathered unawares, from the perfectly unconscious May, was to go in for ornament with definite meaning. She would have facts, she said ; and they must be facts of a high order, if possible ; and the consequence was, that Jack and she, with May and Charles, were all grievously suspected of sentiment and imagination, and all sorts of things, which they were wise enough to repudiate in general terms. They maintained relations with the Intellectual World. ' Bore on, I will endure,' was Flora's impertinent quotation about its organs. Unsoiled copies of the ' Chanticleer' and the £ Scholasticus ' always lay on
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the table for those who liked them ; but they enjoyed more rest in the household than they allowed to the remainder of society.
The Hawkstone dining-room was oak, dark green and gold, — long, low oak mirrors, big table and sideboard of the same, an old Greek marble relief of a chariot-race let into the wall, a Vandyke, two Sir Joshuas, a dis- puted Holbein, an undoubted Gainsborough, and a Jordaens, which held its own with them all. It was a Sir Roland Lattermath, who had served in Holland, — black-gray armour with gold studs, and an orange scarf, painted as by a Dutchman with a taste for colour ; gold sword-hilt, belt and dagger, with wonderful gleams on a dark-green background. Ceiling painted in gray, and pale crimson-tinged clouds, with birds flying up into the bed-rooms in perspective. I don't know how many bed-rooms there were in the house. The children used to be audible now and then in far distance, and servants always liked going there : so I suppose there were plenty. The chief part of Jack's building had consisted in alterations in the upper regions, for the comfort and good regulation of men and maids. He did not say much to his people ; but he cared for them, and they knew it, and they either vanished from his service rather early, or ' hung up their hats ' in their several departments. For stables and kennel, they were kept down strenuously as to scale ; but men, horses, and dogs knew their very sufficient work, and did it. Hard days and good living were their rule of existence, and holidays were not few. There was a servants' library. The house was open all the year ; and the children were healthy and pretty, and well taught in gentle manners from the cradle. Jack's bite was worse than his bark ; for he never barked at all. He was as
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much master as he cared to be : in fact, he liked his people, and they liked him.
The ' public ' rooms faced the large rough park, pur- posely kept rough, to suit the weather-stained walls, which were the chief outer attraction of the plainly- built Holt. It was a sort of Elizabethan concern, with no architectural pretensions except bay-windows and stone mullions, and was as compact as a portmanteau, and very much of the same shape. There was a herd of deer; and plenty of Highland beasts were always en- joying a rest before their fate, — ' feeding,' as Flora was wont to explain to strangers, ' entirely on the thick fogs which prevail over the north of this island in autumn' (deep autumn grass always goes by that name in York- shire). There were broad oaks and beeches, ancient yews and thorns, and great gnarled Scotch firs, with old larches, squirrel-haunted. All the house delighted in squirrels, excepting Diver the retriever, whose privileges were respected by every other creature, and utterly denied by the vicious little things. The old dog felt he did not get the better in his contentions with the active enemy, and, worse still, felt that he did not carry public feeling with him. He heard people laugh. One ought not to laugh at an old dog or horse ; but human nature can't stand it when an ancient and crafty rough spaniel, after long pretended unconsciousness under a tree, makes a grab at a squirrel who incontinently jumps on his back, pulls off his weather-bleached curls with an obvious view to his own and family's bedding, sets up his tail, and chatters loudly to a large party in the breakfast-room. Susan Milton sat next the window : she gave a wild screech of delight, and pointed out of it. Flourish (of spoons and napkins). Alarums. Excursions. Urn nearly 'shot off' the table. Flora shakes her fist,
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but joins the rush into the great bay. Diver howls for very shame, and bolts under a tree : squirrel instantly projects himself on to a low branch, thence to a high one, where he sits across a spray like a sparrow, and contemplates existence and Miss Milton, who has a habit of leaving almonds and raisins in that direction on his account. Row subsides, and breakfast resumed.
' Well, it's a comfort not to have to go out hunting,' says Mr. Reresby, Flora's uncle, and one of the straightest goers in the shires, further making petition for another large cup of tea.
' You'll have to give it up altogether soon, if you drink all that small liquor,' said Jack, handing the new supply.
' Why, aren't we going to walk over the moors to Hawcliffe school-meeting? and won't that take half a stone off us at least?'
' Then do have a few more eggs,' cried Flora, with a gushing air of sympathy, and sending a sort of rack, or battery, of immense turkey's eggs in the direction of the Customer — Reresby went by that name in his county. He was one of the old Holderness breed, not very young, but much modernized, and little the worse for it — not unlike one of the big hounds which are supposed to belong to those parts, and much better bred than he looked.
'You never read "The Arabian Nights," did you, Flora?'
'Why not?'
' Because there's a fellow there that gets into trouble about eating roc's eggs, and you seem to indulge in them.'
' Oh, Aladdin ! He had an uncle, a conjuror, and I haven't. And he had dealings with geniuses, and I
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never see any. Rather impertinent, I'm afraid ; but I can't help it : you put it right into my hands.'
' Won't be offended this time ; but you really are terrible this morning.'
'Why, you almost upset my urn, and shattered my nerves, and cast dastardly imputations on the eggs.'
' No, I'm without fear of them ; and they are without reproach.'
' How nice it must be on the Nile,' said Susan, with great earnestness, 'where one can get crocodile's eggs for breakfast regularly ! Only one must feel very nervous about the bad ones. Fancy just chipping the shell for a strong chicken, — they begin to snap directly, I'm told, — and what a smell of musk!5
' Ah, Miss Milton, you ought to have been with us in Abyssinia ! — Such ostrich omelette ! What ideas you all have, to be sure ! '
'Well, you began with the roc's egg — but here come the letters.'
'An official voice from Tombuie.'
'Tom what?'
'The Yellow Hill, it means; Mr. Hobbes's shooting- lodge, where Charles is staying.'
'What a jolly long letter!' said the chatelaine. £ Charley must be getting quite above himself. Doesn't it make you rather nervous, Susy?'
' Horribly : let's put it off till May comes back this evening.'
'Where's H.R.H. gone off to?' asked Reresby.
' Oh ! we sent a lot of pheasants to the Rothercliffe Infirmary, and she went over in charge : she walks the place quite regularly. The doctors say she is quite of use. She reads and talks, and is good at work ; and all the people take their physic better when she's there ;
no
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and they say she flirts dreadfully with the old bed- ridden people ; and the clergy are all after her, of course ; and her nerve, — you know that, — and then the sight of her is good for most people,' concluded John, meditatively.
'In moderation,' said his wife, taking up her gibeciere, full of keys and letters, and girding it on in a manner highly becoming her figure. 'Well, we are to have a quiet autumn day. Any lady what likes to ride or drive will please give her orders, and lunch at half-past one.'
Mrs. Reresby, the Customer's wife, who resembled nobody so much as ' the grave and beautiful damsel, called Discretion,' in the ' Pilgrim's Progress,' — the one who conducted that rather business-like conversation with Christian, before he got into the house Beautiful, — said she should like a drive after lunch. Susan said she was very stiff, and her horse wanted rest ; which there is every reason to suppose he did, much oftener than he got it ; and it was agreed between her and Flora to go and begin a study of autumn leaves, somewhere by the long water at the bottom of the park, — an undertaking likely to last through several other mornings. Jack and Reresby were already lighting wooden pipes, and pro- pitiating Diver on the gravel ride. It was, as it has been many a century, — latis otia fundis, — quiet times in big country houses, where folly does not rule. There was a pretty group about the door, with its lawn-grass and flower-beds still bright with red geranium : the heliotropes were done for. Flora always sheltered and kept up her borders till the last possible day, and then gave up flowers for the winter : she said chrysanthe- mums only made her dismal. She stood there, — all in olive-gray with a dark-green cord and small hat of the
OUR SKETCHING CLUB.
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same, — all broad folds to her feet, not having yet tucked up her long-tailed gown for the day. She had mastered the rare art of doing so effectively and becomingly. Mrs. Reresby was next her, small-headed and grandly- formed, kind, silent, and simple in spite of forty years of town and country, enjoying a nice passive holiday of utter rest, as all women do who have headed a large household for twenty years. Little Susan was showing her her sketch-book : her red and gold hair was drawn into a large, hard, unchignon'd crown ; her willowy neck kept moving soft and quick as she held her head down somewhat before the older lady, giving short, pithy answers with a little air of deference. Fine as a fay, rather deficient in height, though nobly formed, full of nervous intense life, passionate and tender-hearted, timid and daring, outspoken to her own confusion, well-trained, and needing every bit of her training : she was a person, who, as Charles said, and Hobbes thought, interested one in a manner beyond her size. She possessed a step-mother who was really fond of her, not without